Prof. David Henderson

Prof. David Henderson (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is a Professor of Economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2007) and served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. He blogs at EconLog.




When you try to write about economics for a general audience, are there particular concepts that are especially difficult to communicate?

Yes. Just offhand, deadweight loss from taxes and thinking on the margin. Or maybe I should say that they’re easy to communicate, but harder for people to understand and integrate into their thinking. On thinking on the margin, I think of it as a partial derivative in calculus. You hold everything else constant and see what changes when one variable changes. But most of my students have never really mastered calculus. 

You are originally from Canada. Have you noted any differences in how economics is taught in Canada and the United States?

Hmmm. That’s hard to answer. Remember that the last time I experienced how economics is taught in Canada was in 1971-72 at the University of Western Ontario in London. (I think it’s now called Western University.) So my info is dated. But just talking to people I run into at conferences, my best guess is that it’s not substantially different. I should point out also, though, that I got my Ph.D. at UCLA and that not only was economics taught differently there than in Canada, but also it was taught differently there than in almost the whole rest of the United States. No one taught the way Armen Alchian did: puzzling through a problem, putting almost nothing on the board, thinking in words, not math and not even graphs. He was the person who convinced me that you can think rigorously in words. He has still affected my teaching 40+ years later.

 

Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged a good book to introduce high schoolers to economics, or are there others you would recommend?

 

Yes. I think it’s a good book to introduce high schoolers to a few things: (1) why “making money” is productive if done in a non-coercive way, (2) the idea of rent-seeking or, more accurately, privilege seeking, (3) the complex ways that various sectors of an economy interact, and (3) the unintended, and often tragic, consequences of government intervention. I highly recommend Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book, still relevant, Economics in One Lesson. I first read it when I was about 17 or 18 and it opened my eyes. That was after having read Atlas Shrugged.

Prof. Peter Temin

Prof. Peter Temin (Ph.D., M.I.T.) is the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusets Institute of Technology. His books include The New Economic History (1972), Lessons From the Great Depression (1989), and The Roman Market Economy (2013).

You have written a lot about the economics of the Roman Empire. Were you interested in Rome or economics first, and what brought these two into contact?

I read Moses Finley's book, The Ancient Economy (1973) and been disappointed with the level of economic analysis in it, but I did not start to write about the ancient economy until many decades later.  I hope that my work on ancient economies has enabled others to go further in that field than I could.

What changes have you seen in how economics is taught since you were a student?

Economics now is taught with much more sophisticated mathematics than when I was a student.  This has led to better econometrics and microeconomics, but it has not helped much in macroeconomics.  That is why I wrote a small book on Keynesian economics a few years ago.  And my latest book, The Vanishing Middle Class (2017), is based on a simple model of economic development.

Prof. Josh Hendrickson

Josh Hendrickson (Ph.D., Wayne State University) is Associate Proffessor of Economics at Ole Miss University. He blogs at everydayecon.wordpress.com.


 
What made you decide to blog about economics when there are so many other blogs already?

I decided to start blogging back when I was in graduate school. There were not as many blogs then as there are now. I saw it as a way to interact with economists and work out my ideas. Writing not only forces you to think carefully about ideas, but also to learn how to present those ideas clearly (I don't pretend that my presentation is always clear, but I like to think I'm asymptotically approaching clarity!). Economics is less about what to think and more about how to think. To learn economics, you need to really engage with the ideas. Writing is a great way to do that. So, in other words, I started blogging out of self-interest. I'll let others decide whether this was Adam Smith's invisible hand at work.

You’ve written about Bitcoin and other forms of online monetary transfer; do you think economists have paid too little attention to it or is it a passing fad?

I'm fascinated with bitcoin. Anyone who is a monetary economist should be excited about bitcoin because cryptocurrency poses a number of theoretical questions and will also provide evidence regarding existing monetary theories. To me, I think too much of the focus to this point has been on whether or not bitcoin can overtake existing currencies -- and people have very strong opinions on this. I think the technology itself has the potential to change the way we do a lot of different things. I also think that right now, as a currency, cryptocurrencies likely have the most to offer to those in developing countries with poor financial institutions and untrustworthy governments than the developed world. This raises a lot of political economy questions as well. As far as my overall opinion, I have no idea if this is a fad or a revolutionary idea, but I'm excited to watch things play out. This is about as close to a natural experiment as we get in monetary economics!

Prof. Angela Dills

Angela Dills (Ph.D., Boston University), is Professor of Economics and Gimelstob-Landry Distinguished Professor for Regional Economic Development at Western Carolina University. Her research interests are in public economics and labor economics,  with special interests in the economics of education, crime, and health. She has received many awards for her teachng, including the National Council on Economic Education and the Excellence in Research Reward from the WCU College of Business.



What concepts are most difficult for economics students to grasp?

Comparative advantage is frequently a difficult concept for students to grasp. Students typically can figure out how to calculate opportunity cost for a given person or country. But to also change some students' intuition about trade between two people as being exploitative for the weaker person can take more effort. In a related vein, when we discuss supply and demand and market competition, many students enter the course thinking that a producers' goal is to sell more output than their competition; convincing them that the optimal choice is to do the best the producer can (profit maximize) instead of trying to do better than someone else (market share maximize) can go against their existing beliefs.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist? 

I love to read but, reflecting on your question, cannot point to a specific book that was important to me in my work as an economist. I enjoy reading pop-economics books (Freakonomics, Naked Economics, and the like), particularly as an instructor, to find better and more interesting ways to explain concepts to those new to economics. One book that really helped me to better understand political discourse was Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.

Prof. Michael Roach

Michael Roach (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His areas of expertise include law and economics and sports economics.




You went to a small liberal arts college. What are the advantages and disadvantages of going to a small liberal arts college when you plan to go to grad school in economics?

In going to graduate school in economics, you are training to be able to rigorously explore important and interesting questions about the choices people make. Because it is such a wide-ranging discipline, a wide-ranging undergraduate education, as emphasized in a liberal arts college, can be an asset. If it gives students more context in which to think about the tradeoffs people have to make in a variety of settings, it can be a big advantage in developing and sustaining a research agenda. Another, more concrete, advantage of attending a liberal arts college is the small classes and how that leads to a situation where students really get to know their professors. This can lead to students having more (and more productive) conversations about their futures. The interaction with faculty that is encouraged there can really help students understand if graduate school really is for them and, if so, get them on a path to being as prepared as possible for it. A student who wants to go to graduate school in economics is really not all that constrained by the undergraduate course offerings at a liberal arts college: between the economics, math, and computer science courses, a liberal arts education can certainly prepare students for the rigors of a top-flight graduate program.   

One disadvantage of attending a liberal arts college, as compared to a larger research university, is that it is much more difficult to take (or even audit) graduate classes that might help prepare students for studying economics at the graduate level (or to get a sense of whether or not it is something they would want to pursue). Furthermore, at larger universities, faculty members may have larger research budgets that allow them to bring on undergraduate students to do paid research work. If you already know you want to be an economist, the availability of that type of work could be an attractive feature of a larger university.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist or that you would recommend to aspiring economists?

The Winner’s Curse by Richard Thaler was one book that really made me excited about studying economics more deeply. It digs into a variety of situations where economic theory does not explain observed behavior. The paradoxes described are interesting individually, but I liked the book so much because it got me thinking generally about the limits of theories designed to explain what people do. The realization that economics was “messy” in this way made it much more interesting to me and made me excited about the challenges it presents.

Also, even though they aren't about economics specifically, I always think back to several books written by Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, about his life and experiences. There are several of them (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and What Do You Care What Other People Think?). I’m obviously not a physicist, but his discussions of science and curiosity apply to economists as well.

What is the worst advice that you have ever been given about becoming an economist?

I actually got really good advice from my professors and mentors about preparing for graduate school and what to expect, so I really can’t complain about that at all. One thing I wish I had realized (I was probably told this at some point, but it was the sort of thing I suppose I had to learn for myself) was that the transition from coursework to doing your own research can be tricky. They are complementary phases of graduate school, certainly, but they require different skills. It’s helpful to at least keep some part of your brain thinking about what types of questions you want to address even as you are powering through your coursework. That makes navigating the transition a bit easier.

Prof. Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He specializes in public economics, public choice, psychology and economics, public opinion, economics of the family and education, genoeconomics, and Austrian economics. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. He is currently writing a new book: The Case Against Education: A Professional Student Explains Why Our Education System Is a Big Waste of Time and Money. He writes EconLog, named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top websites in the economics blogosphere.


 

You're a prolific blogger, but you're also a Ph.D. Am I, a non-Ph.D., wasting my time blogging about economics?

If you want to be an economist, you are absolutely *not* “wasting your time” with a blog.  It may not help you get into a better college, but writing about a topic is probably the best way to truly learn about it.  If all you do is read, it’s easy to kid yourself about how much you understand.  But writing is explaining, and as an old saying goes, “If you can’t explain something clearly to someone else, you probably don’t understand it yourself.”  And along the way, you’ll make personal connections with practicing economists, any one of which could be a huge professional help to you.  Keep blogging, young economist!

Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize

A few weeks ago, my sister visited the University of Chicago, and took this picture of the Nobel Prize in Economics that Milton Friedman got along with other awards he won.

Prof. J. C. Bradbury

J.C. Bradbury (Ph.D., George Mason University), is the author of The Baseball Economist, a book about how baseball can be explained using economic principles. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Kennesaw State University just north of Atlanta, and runs the blog sabernomics.com, where he discusses the economics of baseball.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist or that you would recommend to aspiring economists, or any books you would perhaps warn young economists about?

I really enjoy The Armchair Economist, by Steven Landsburg. I actually did not read it until I was in graduate school learning about economics in a much more complex way. Landsburg asks seemingly simple questions (e.g., Why is popcorn more expensive at the movies? Why do stores sell items for 99 cents?) but finding the answers with basic economic theory was much harder in practice than it looks on the surface. I used to be a part of a group that focused on asking and answering "Armchair" questions, and I learned so much economics from this interaction. I also enjoyed The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Their application of economics to government institutions explained so much to me. As for books I would recommend to aspiring economists, Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist is good. Freakonomics is fun, too. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom was way ahead of its time. As for books I would avoid, I tend to forget those rather quickly. 

Do you have any advice to give to students like me?

My advice for students is to remain skeptical and don't just take what your teacher says as truth.   Always speak up in class and ask why. Have confidence in yourself and don't be ashamed of admitting your ignorance. I often have students approach me after class with excellent questions and I say, “why didn't you ask that in class?” If you have a questions, it's likely that many other students are thinking the same thing. I love being able to answer such questions in front of the whole class. Learn to teach yourself by asking hard questions and seeking out answers on your own. The internet makes this easy. Dive in and finds books and papers that can help enlighten you.