Prof. Mike Munger

Prof. Mike Munger (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis) is the director of the interdisciplinary Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program at Duke University. He has authored seven books, in addition to 200 articles and papers. His newest book, Tomorrow 3.0 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), addresses the sharing economy.




What's the biggest or most interesting mistake you have ever made as an economist, and was there a way to fix it?

I did an interview with a major newspaper about the costs of trade barriers. My work was a little out of date, and I said so (6 years out of date). But the newspaper person asked me what CURRENT costs were. So I just updated for inflation. I said I had only updated for inflation, but the reporter didn't really get it. This was in the early 1980s, when inflation was high. So the newspaper headline was "Costs of trade barriers has risen 22% in just six years!" But of course I had no evidence of that, that was all just the adjustment for constant dollars. The only way to fix that is to have better economic education.

In your opinion, what is the most important economic idea that most people have never heard of?

Opportunity cost. People don't understand it, even if they have heard of it.

Prof. Abigail Hall Blanco

Abigail Hall Blanco (Ph.D., George Mason University) is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa. She is the author, with C. Coyne, of Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U. S. Militarism (Stanford University Press, 2018).

 

What’s the best (or worst) advice you ever received when it comes to being an economist?

The best advice I ever received as a graduate student was to write liberally and often, and to focus on the topics I found the most interesting. Had I not been given this advice, I would have never found my current research program--and I couldn't imagine doing anything else! The worst advice I ever received was to just do "standard" economics (by this they meant standard econometrics). This would have ended poorly! 

What economic concept do you students have the most difficulty understanding?

Students are often really tripped up by the concept of cost as opportunity cost. We spend so much time thinking of cost as the equivalent of price. I spend a lot of time in micro principles trying to divorce these two ideas.

What is the most unexpected lesson you learned from you previous career as a dancer?

Comparative advantage! Some dancers are really superb at turn sequences, others at leaps, others . . . well . . . they have a comparative advantage in things other than dancing. When doing choreography--who you use for what relates directly to their comparative advantage.

Prof. James Heckman

James Heckman (Ph.D., Princeton University) is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000.

You majored in math as a college student. Did math lead to economics because you were interested in applying math, or were you interested in economics and saw that math was the way to understand economics better?

I was a math major who discovered economics. Actually, I was a physics major who took a lot of math. Hated physics labs and majored in math. Then I discovered economics. The math was useful. The economics was fascinating.

What's the most common mistake you see students and even fellow economists make?

Ignoring the budget constraint. Fellow behavioral economists especially. They fail to see fundamental irrationality of the modeled agents with budget constraints. Economics is all about it. They ignore it.

Prof. Steve Horwitz

Prof. Steve Horwitz (Ph.D., George Mason University) is Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He is the author of Hayek's Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).




What textbook did you use when you first studied economics, and would you still use it today as a professor?

To be honest, I cannot for the life of me remember what book I was assigned when I first took intro! My guess is that whatever it was, I wouldn't use it today because there are so many new approaches, and developments of old ones, over the last 37 years that hte book would be out of date.

For long-term happiness, how important (or unimportant) is it that one has the same perspecive on economic matters as one's spouse?

I don’t think one has to have the same political views as one’s spouse to be happy. I think it can help, but I know plenty of happy couples who either disagree or where one spouse just isn’t especially political. I do think that mutual respect is important, of course. And I do think that if you’re going to be the spouse of an economist, you should at least understand the economic way of thinking because it’s likely to be invoked in a lot of household decision making.

Lotta Moberg

Lotta Moberg (Ph.D., George Mason University) is a macroeconomic analyst at William Blair & Co. in Chicago and the author of The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones: Concentrating Economic Development (Routledge, 2017). Previously she served in the Swedish Defense Forces and with the Swedish Foreign Ministry.

 
If you could mandate that every student read one book in the field of economics, what would it be?

I had to think about whether it would be good for everyone to read one book. On net, I think it is, if it is short and simple enough to explain some of the most destructive fallacies people hold. Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson may be the best. Alternatively, and much shorter, James Gwartney's little book on economic principles, Common Sense Economics. It is probably the best. I would make people read it to become less destructive citizens, not to educate those who already know some economics.

What is the best (or worst) advice you ever got on becoming an economist?

Probably not the best but memorable: When taking a class, be selfish. Look for how you can use things from the class for your research and spend minimal time on the rest.

The worst was probably to stay away from a place like George Manson University because people will find you weird and so it will be hard to get a job.

Prof. Vincent Geloso

Vincent Geloso (Ph.D., London School of Economics) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. His research interests include North American ecnomic history, public economics, and population economics. His most recent book is Rethinking Canadian Economic Growth and Development since 1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 

 

Everything involves trade-offs. Economics is much more data-driven than it was a few decades ago. What are the most important or least discussed trade-offs in the increased emphasis on math in the study and teaching of economics?

I would state that there are two trade-offs that we need to be aware. First, mathematics allow us to make axiomatic statements. A demand function merely expresses mathematically the axiom that, all else being equal, we demand less of something if the price increases. All axioms are inherently true. The problem is that while true, an axiom can be irrelevant in a particular context or setting. Relevance is asserted only through the use of data and econometrics. A good economist is one who does both as they are complements to the production of valuable research and teaching. It is for this reason that I specialize in economic history as I am forced to dive in theory and use applied methods to assess the relevance of economic theories to explain the past (i.e. our database of observations). Second, economists forget that data matters. I have very often seen economists simply "chuck" the data in Stata and not ask any questions about their construction. Are they suited for the question being asked? How were they built? What is the most modest but valid case I can make with this data? I think that the work of Morten Jerven on African economies is a good example here. He used different databases of GDP per capita for African countries and found that, for the same year, they had dramatic differences in the ranking of these economies. Why such differences? How much does it affect the results just to use another source?  These are basic questions which economists tend to ignore. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find an explanation that convinces me as to why economists sometime act in such a careless way with regards to data (especially given the technocratic tendency taken by the profession in the last forty years). 

Is being really interested in economics a good enough reason to major in economics?

Hell yes! For the last ten years of my life, I have been going and leaving bed thinking about economics (and social sciences more broadly). During my undergraduate days, I spent all my days reading about economics. When unsatisfied with my learned tools, I would simply go online and seek every resource possible to help me learn more. This was only heightened when I discovered that economic history was a subfield of economics.   Passion about a field and dedication to its study is necessary and sufficient even if you are not a stellar student. I often point out that I was an ordinary student at the University of Montreal where I did my undergraduate degree.  However, when I became a graduate student, the passion allowed me to surge ahead, write and read every day. If you are able to muddle through the classes while being passionate and hard-working, you can be a great economist! Obviously, being smart just makes the whole thing easier (but I will caution against the arrogance that sometimes comes with that).