The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists

3. Herbert Gintis

chapter 3 Herbert Gintis External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute, Emeritus Professor, University of Massachusetts  The interview was conducted on March 15, 2002, at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Can you tell us how you got into economics? In college I knew nothing about economics. I was in a special program at the University of Pennsylvania for students who had scored high on their SAT tests. In this program we didn’t take normal courses. I took only one history course as an undergraduate, and no English courses. I studied mostly math, French, and Spanish language and literature. I was in the program from 1958 to 1961, and one of those years I was in France. I also taught Calculus I, a regular undergraduate course, my last year there, which paid my tuition. The bottom line is that I never had a social science course, and so I knew nothing of economics. I didn’t know what “income” was when I went into graduate school in economics; I did know what an “income tax” was, however, because my dad always complained about paying it. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania I went to Harvard to get a Ph.D. in math. I was very political, and as I was  77 writing my dissertation in mathematics; it seemed like I was schizophrenic . I spent hours and hours writing a dissertation, but what I really was doing was spending time organizing for social change in poor communities around Boston and participating in the antiwar movement. So I decided to switch out of math with just a master’s degree. A friend of mine owned a sandal shop that he ran in Harvard Square. I took over his shop and became a sandal maker and hired some young women to make handbags. It was okay, but I wasn’t really into feet, so after doing it for a while I decided to go back to school. I asked a friend of mine, Chuck Levenstein, who’s an economist, what should I do. He asked me if I were a Marxist. I said yes, although I didn’t really know what that meant. I had read C. Wright Mills, and some writings by Marxists, so we were radical Marxists. So he said, “Well then you should do economics because the economy determines everything.” So I took off from making sandals one day (I told my assistant to mind the shop), and in June of 1963 I went to Littauer Center (the Harvard University economics department) in my leather work clothes—a bearded, long-haired hippy if there ever was one. I wandered about, but nobody was around since it was summertime. One door was open, there was a guy named James Duesenberry, so I walked in and said that I wanted to study economics. He asked me why, and I told him the story about Marxism and the economy. He said that he could get me into the department with no problem because it was a transfer from one department to another and the economics department loves mathematicians. But he told me to read an introductory textbook before I started graduate school to see what I was getting into. I asked which one, and he said Samuelson. So I read Samuelson and came back. He asked if I still wanted to do economics, and I said sure. He said that he thought I was going to ‹nd out that studying economics is different than what I was thinking it was going to be, but okay. And that’s how it happened. At ‹rst I was very hostile to becoming an economist. I felt like I was not one of these people. How could I tell my artist and hippie friends that I was studying to be an economist? No way. My attitude was that I’m not really an economist because I care about consciousness and culture and all of that. Then I got totally socialized— to the point where I prided myself in being able to read the national income accounts and knowing what “errors in variables” means. It took me some time, however. Now I am at the point of bristling when people bad-mouth economists. Who would have believed it? the changing face of economics 78 What graduate courses do you remember? Harvard teachers were not well-known for caring very much about teaching. They were better than my...