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April 23, 2007
Graduate studies in economics
The reading list grows ever longer. David Colander's latest, The Making of an Economist, Redux will move immediately to the top of my list. I shall put it on the calendar as the first book to read after final exams in a couple weeks. That should be a good way to start the summer.
The book is an update of The Making of an Economist by Colander and Arjo Klamer. Since their book appeared, there has been a sizable influx into the profession by economists trained in the manner highlighted by Colander and Klamer. In the opinion of some, it hasn't been all good.
Of course, I am part of the generation that came of age academically post-Colander and Klamer. I even remember some discussions in class and out of class during my undergraduate days about some of the ground they covered. (And yet still I chose to get my Ph.D.!) So I'm excited to see that Colander has returned for a second look.
Arnold Kling is already into it. He quotes from the book:
In the early 1980's, many students went into graduate economics study thinking that it would be like undergraduate school; today almost all students know better. In effect, students have been prescreened to be comfortable with the mathematics in the program. Similarly, graduate schools know better what they want and select students who are comfortable in the approach that will be taught.
By the mid-1990s, this was already true to a large extent, but it is even more so today.
And...
the macro that is taught to the students in the core has lost touch with both policy and empirical evidence. Instead, students are presented with dynamic stochastic optimal control theory and Euler equations.
I like Euler equations. But Colander has a point. As I made my way through the Ph.D. program, I could not afford to be as introspective as Colander is and others have been. Furthermore, I had no other experience to compare it with--I was not in graduate school in the 1980s. By the end of the program, I admit to a certain amount of an "I did it, so you should have to do it too" style of thinking. It's only natural.
But in the last couple years, I have had the experience of teaching macro at the MA level. This isn't the sort of thing you spend a lot of time training for in grad school, but it is a pretty important task. To get the MA degree, you need to take at least one more course in macro beyond the intermediate (undergraduate) level. (At least this is the case at WIU, and I suspect it is so in any other program--some may require two, but I doubt that any require zero.) What do you put into those courses? Answering this question has made me think harder about macro than I ever did in graduate school--and I didn't think that was possible. It has made me a better teacher at the undergraduate level in the process.
I continue to think hard about this as I ponder revising these courses for my third go-round next year. I plan to share these thoughts on the blog and invite yours as well. To be sure, my MA courses are not comparable to the Ph.D. level mathematical gymnastics that Colander scrutinizes. But neither are they simply a restatement of intermediate undergraduate macro. There needs to be a middle ground. Luckily, the middle ground is a vast wide open space.
Let me close with a comment from Kling:
Another reason that macro does not work in grad school is that studying macro is like studying polio--the serious problem of long-term macroeconomic distress has been eradicated. As recently as when I was in graduate school, the problem of stagflation at least provide some motivation to do applied work. Until there is a major outbreak of inflation or prolonged recession, I think that macro ought to be a history of thought course.
Questions of economic growth still provide motivation for macroeconomists to do applied work. But then, if you are going to study economic growth, you should read David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
Incidentally, if you think that Colander's book sounds interesting, you will probably also want to read this article by Robert Solow (hoisted from my graduate macro reading list).
UPDATE: My apologies. The link to the Solow article above requires a subscription. This link through a free site ("findarticles.com") should work.
UPDATE 2: Arnold Kling follows my link to Solow and responds.
Posted by William Polley at April 23, 2007 08:56 PM
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Comments
Thanks very much for these thoughts. Could you provide another link to the Solow article? It seems to be behind a barrier.
Posted by: Rob Hayward at April 24, 2007 12:18 AM
In 1993 I wrote a paper which was convenient to model with an IS-LM (my Ph.D. coursework was from 85-7).
I ran into a problem and ran it by a colleague who had just come out of Wisconsin, with an educational vintage that was 5 years shorter.
He had never seen - or even heard of - an IS-LM model. In his defense, he did not have an undergraduate economics degree, nor was he often let loose on undergraduate classes.
It's 15 years later, and he has published less than I have ... but I think every one of his articles is in a better journal than any one of mine.
Sour grapes ... yes ... but I worry about the usefulness of some of what we do.
Posted by: David Tufte at April 26, 2007 10:58 PM