Prof. Peter Leeson

Prof. Peter Leeson (Ph.D., George Mason University) is  the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. Formerly, Professor Leeson was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, a Visiting Fellow in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, and the F. A. Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics.



In the preface of your 2009 book on piracy (The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Princeton University Press), you asked your girlfriend to marry you. That’s a risk that most people wouldn’t take. Were there any economic principles at work in taking such an unusual approach to that decision (consciously at the time or now looking back after a few years)?

There are economic principles at work in taking every decision! The one guiding that decision: Of the proposal alternatives then available to me, which one would Ania appreciate the most – maximize her “proposal profit”? I think I got pretty close, and we’ll have been enjoying the returns for nine years come this spring.

Your just-published book (WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird, Stanford University Press) highlights many superstitious practices and their rational economic effects. Many people would think of superstitions as inherently irrational. Should we re-define “superstition” in light of your findings?

How about we redefine “irrational” instead? Something like this, “The pervasive, false belief according to which people do not always pursue their goals as best they can given their limitations and the limitations of their environment. See also, superstition.”

If I’d like to become an economist, what’s the biggest mistake I should avoid?

Don’t confuse economics with the technical tools often used by economists – or with psychology. Also, don’t confuse a counterfeit Cohiba Behike with the real thing: the former tastes like crap and won’t do anything for you; the latter is sublime and will (in a few years, my young friend!) make you a better economist.

Prof. Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Ph.D., Harvard University) taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. She has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, Chicago-School style (she taught at the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1980), but protests, “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian.” The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and honorary degrees from universities in five different countries, Prof. McCloskey's latest book is Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

 


In your short article from 1992 titled “The Natural,” you wrote about the difficulty of teaching economics to undergraduates, due to the tendency to treat them as if they learned the subject easily, instead of making them push through all the difficulties of understanding the subject carefully. Has anything happened to change your views in the past 25 years?

​No, because it's not about how hard they work, but about certain personality types or family backgrounds grasp the subject easier, naturally. It's like having a good arm for pitching a baseball, the term "a natural" coming from baseball talk. Some people see arguments from self-interest easier because they run their own lives on self-interest. And others, whether or not they have that (rather common) personality, grow up in small business or farms in which they learn the importance of price incentives and the results of chores and so forth in a way that a student does not who grows up in a household detached from the market (Mom and Dad "go to the office" to make their income, which is mysterious in a way that helping your father plow the back 40 is not)​.

You have written seventeen books and hundreds of scholarly articles in your long and productive career. Is there any one thing in your previous writing about economics that you would drastically change?

​Yes. When I was a young professor I was certain that (1) people were motivated by profit only and (2) only quantitative evidence was real evidence. Without throwing out what can be learned from watching the profit and measuring things, I have grown to see that (1) and (2) are mistaken.​

Prof. David Berri

David Berri (Ph.D., Colorado State University) is professor of economics at Southern Utah University. He is the co-author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Explore the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports (Financial Times Press, 2010). In addition, he is the sole author of Sports Economics (a textbook forthcoming in 2018 from Macmillan). Prof. Berri has published more than fifty academic papers on such topics as the evaluation of players and coaches, competitive balance, the drafting of players, labor disputes, the NCAA, and gender issues in sports. He has also written on sports economics for a number of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, theAtlantic.com, and Time.com.

As an economist, how do you think the NBA or other sports will change in the near or distant future in ways people might not expect? 

Sports tend to be a realm dominated by men.  But more than 3 million girls play high school sports in the United States while more than 200,000 women play sports in college.  In addition, a recent Gallup poll indicated that 51% of women consider themselves sports fans.  So there are more than 60 million women who follow sports.

So the big change I think we will see in all sports is the increasing participation of women.  Men tend to think sports is their world.  But women very much like sports.  And in the future, the economics of sports is going to reflect this fact.  We will see more and more women playing sports and more and more women talking about sports.

Many men are not expecting this change.  But as the 21^st century proceeds, this is the change we are going to see in sports.
 
You have written a lot on the economic aspects of sports. Is the "sports + economics" niche full, or is there room for more people to work in this area? 

Sports economics -- like many "niche" fields in economics -- is far from saturated.  One issue is that many economists outside the field may not take work in this area as serious as they should.  But I sense this is true of many niche fields. 

Sports, though, provides an incredible data set to study human behavior.  So there are so many important issues one can examine in sports economics.  And these are often hard to study outside of sports.  Such topics as gender, race, managerial decision-making, and worker exploitation are but a sample of the issues that one can investigate in sports economics.

What's the best advice you ever got as you were thinking about becoming an economist?

More than a century ago, Alfred Marshall emphasized that economics “is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth."  I think this one sentence should be remembered by anyone who wants to study economics.  Many treat economics as less of a science and more like a religion.  They cling to the idea that human beings are perfectly rational, markets are always good, and government doesn’t help.

You should approach economics with an understanding that the answer is often “it depends”.  Sometimes markets are a good idea.  Sometimes they are not. Sometimes government doesn’t help. Sometimes it definitely does.  One answer to all questions doesn’t exist. 

So you need to approach economics with an open-mind.  We don’t know the answer to our research questions until we do the research.  Often we are surprised by what we find.