Prof. Joshua Angrist (Ph.D., Princeton University) is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a director of MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before coming to MIT in 1996. He is the author (with Steve Pischke) of Mostly Harmless Economics: An Empiricist's Companion (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Your CV contains a number of publications on the role of data in policy debates. Do you tend to be hopeful or despairing when it comes to policy makers paying attention to empirical/statistical studies produced by economists?
Hope springs eternal in my empirical breast.
Do your students have more trouble with the mathematical side of generating data or with the process of writing up their results and communicating them clearly and effectively?
My graduate students know a lot of math, probably so much that it inhibits thought. But yes indeed they struggle to write a coherent paragraph. Too bad, since scholars like those they aspire to be write for a living.
Prof. David Cleeton (Ph.D., Washington University at St. Louis) is Professor of Economics at Illinois State University. He is coauthor
(with Nobel Laureate Robert C. Merton and Zvi Bodie) of the textbook
Financial Economics. He previously taught at Oberlin College, Christopher Newport University, and Ohio State University.
Everything involves trade-offs. What are the trade-offs of letting older economics textbooks go out of print and publishing newer ones?
A textbook is to college academics as the catechism is to Christian religion. The analogy is that both are instructive methods to summarize and contextualize the principles of the discipline or religion in question. However, the world is dynamic and evolving so the relevancy for practice must be updated to incorporate contemporary concerns and issues. Obviously, the Catholic Church is ponderous in its response while academics are innovative and entrepreneurial. There may also be important differences related to where you would place academics and church authorities along the organizational spectrum from competition to monopoly.
What course that is not normally required for an undergraduate economics major do you think all students should take before they finish their degree?
That is a tough question because the answer might be more efficiently crafted to reflect the interests, abilities, and career plans of a given economics student. For those interested in pursuing graduate studies in economics or a related field they should familiarize themselves with the basic tools used in crafting formal economic models. That means taking a course in mathematical economics, which itself may have some important prerequisites. For the student interested in a more broadly based liberal education I would suggest an economic history or history of economic thought course. Personally, I hedged my bet and took both.
