The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists

1. Deirdre McCloskey

chapter 1 Deirdre McCloskey Distinguished Professor of English, History, and Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Tinbergen Professor, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.  The interview was conducted at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, March 16, 2002. How did you get interested in economics? When I was in high school in 1959–60, I read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and thought of myself as being on the Left. I was a Joan Baez socialist. I went to college intending to be a history major and found that you had to work an awful lot, you had to read all these books, it was really quite tedious; that’s not because I didn’t have good teachers, I had excellent teachers. I wanted something easier and something that would satisfy the adolescent desire of doing something good in the world. I couldn’t do political science, or government as they called it at Harvard, because my father was chair of the department. So I said, how about economics? And somebody suggested looking at Bob Heilbroner’s book. So in the summer before my sophomore year I read Heilbroner’s book and instantly became a convert to economics, as has happened to hundreds of other people with that book.  27 How were your ‹rst classes in economics? Did you enjoy them? Did you enjoy your teachers? I took Otto Eckstein’s Ec-1, and he did an excellent job. In it we had some superb visiting speakers. I remember John Dunlop coming ; he stunned those smart-ass Harvard undergraduate guys. (Almost all of us were guys, because in those times the proportion of females was quite small, so we were tough.) But overall it wasn’t a stimulating ‹rst course. As a sophomore I had a seminar with Eric Gustafson, who was for a long time at the University of California at Davis. He was terri‹c; he charmed us into this ‹eld. It was a weekly meeting where we produced a paper. Then in my junior year I had Lars Sandburg, the economics historian, as my tutor in my macroeconomics course. The microeconomics course was one of the very last times Edward Chamberlin taught, and he did, as always, an extraordinary job despite the fact that he was ill. It was gripping stuff. In the spring we had Arthur Smithies, who had a bemused view of macroeconomics. I have never gotten over my bemusement of macro. It still sticks with me. What happened with Arthur was very interesting. At the time I didn’t quite grasp it. He would keep trying to explain the multiplier or something like that, and he would screw it up because he was drunk. He would come to class drunk, or at least hung over. He’d get confused, and in a self-deprecating way he would say that he couldn’t understand why something wasn’t working out. I think he was actually, in a subtle way, criticizing the whole ‹eld. The reason I can’t get it clear to you is because it is not clear, but perhaps it was just his hangover. You decided to stay at Harvard to go to graduate school. Unfortunately. I could have gone to MIT, but John Meyer, the transportation economist, was supporting me. He was at Harvard, so I decided to stay. They didn’t offer me a big fellowship at MIT because I didn’t graduate summa cum laude. And I did a terrible senior dissertation that will go down in the annals of how not to do a senior dissertation. It was a boring input-output model; the title was “Road and Rail in India.” Did your background with your intellectual family signi‹cantly in›uence how you thought of economics? I always thought of economics as being very much a social science , as being part of intellectual activity in general. That’s natural the changing face of economics 28 for the son of a political scientist and the son of a very intellectual, if not formally educated, mom. I still have intellectual conversations with my mom; she’s about eighty. We might do a book some day called My Daughter the Economist, which has a lot of ironies in it, where we’ll have a conversational format where she’ll ask about economics and try to get me to predict the interest rate. What did your father think about economics? Well, he...