Prof. Gavin Wright

Prof. Gavin Wright (Ph.D., Yale University) is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has taught at the University of Michigan, and at both Cambridge and Oxford. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an National Science Foundation Grant, among many others. He has authored or coauthored many books, including Reckoning With Slavery (Oxford University Press, 1976) and Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

 

Was there a particular person—a professor or someone outside of academia—who played an important role in your decision to become an economist?
 
The most influential economist for me was Joseph Conard, who taught the economic theory seminar at Swarthmore College.  From Joe Conard I learned that it is possible to maintain Quaker values while pursuing economics as rigorously and truthfully as possible.  Sad to say, Joe Conard died of leukemia during my senior year, so I did not have the chance to share thoughts with him as I pursued my own career.  In terms of economic history, the influential person was William N. Parker at Yale, who hired me to work on the Parker-Gallman sample from the 1860 census at the end of my first year of graduate school. It was all downhill after that.

If you were not an economist, what would you be?

The appeal of economics for me was that you could be an academic while also having expertise and engagement with real-world issues.  As it turned out, I became an economic historian, a relatively academic specialty.  My best guess is that if I were not an economist, I would still be in some type of intellectual career.