Robert Lucas passed away this week and, as a star in the field, there is an ongoing avalanche of appreciations about his contributions to economics. Lucas was a macroeconomist, adjacent to but not part of my own field of labor economics, and so I will mostly leave it to others to discuss his contribution to economics. But I do have a few things to say about him, not least because, for a time at least, he was my advisor in graduate school at the University of Chicago.
Well-written as always. It took me back to grad school at WashU, seminars with Doug North, endless theorizing about the rationality of peasants in the developing world, and the notion that strong property rights and institutions would lead to increased economic development. I agreed that rural Kenyan farmers made rational decisions but the economic approach was skin deep without intensive ethnographic study to understand the factors involved in the decision making. American economists seemed to think that financial gain was the driving force but I was sure it was far more complex and inter-generational.
One of my professors was a University of Chicago alumnus who was a rabid pit bull in any presentation. When I presented the theoretical background to my proposed dissertation, he insisted that without my being able to thoroughly debunk Marxist scholarship on property rights I couldn’t possibly know what I was doing. The attrition rate in the program was about 80% and he seemed proud of that.
Sorry for your loss. It sounds like he was an interesting guy.
Sorry for those experiences, John. A few responses:
1. There's no doubt that some economists should widen their intellectual palette a bit, but then we all have limited intellectual resources, so the problem of how to allocate one's energy is genuinely challenging, IMO.
2. I think the seminar culture at Chicago was too combative.....although I think that a more moderate amount of interrogation is helpful.....nothing's worse than a seminar where nobody asks any questions.
3. Chicago in my day was a high-attrition program...I was lucky to get through, but then I also probably wouldn't be admittable by their standards today.
4. My ultimate advisor, Bob Topel, was more approachable and modest than Lucas (though also freaky smart). He once said something that I admired: "Unemployment reminds economists that they have a lot to be modest about." Both Krugman and Lucas - but especially Krugman! - could have thought that way more often.
We students thought of Bob Lucas as the math wizard. But his background was the liberal arts (hence the writing skill). He thought the idea that idea of agents in a model having the expectations of the model was so important that he taught himself the math required to build models containing the idea.
You left out one of the better parts of the divorce settlement. Rita's clause to split the Nobel prize would expire the year *after* Bob won it. This led many economists to quip that her "perfect foresight" in the particular led credence to the notion of rational expectations in general.
Well-written as always. It took me back to grad school at WashU, seminars with Doug North, endless theorizing about the rationality of peasants in the developing world, and the notion that strong property rights and institutions would lead to increased economic development. I agreed that rural Kenyan farmers made rational decisions but the economic approach was skin deep without intensive ethnographic study to understand the factors involved in the decision making. American economists seemed to think that financial gain was the driving force but I was sure it was far more complex and inter-generational.
One of my professors was a University of Chicago alumnus who was a rabid pit bull in any presentation. When I presented the theoretical background to my proposed dissertation, he insisted that without my being able to thoroughly debunk Marxist scholarship on property rights I couldn’t possibly know what I was doing. The attrition rate in the program was about 80% and he seemed proud of that.
Sorry for your loss. It sounds like he was an interesting guy.
Sorry for those experiences, John. A few responses:
1. There's no doubt that some economists should widen their intellectual palette a bit, but then we all have limited intellectual resources, so the problem of how to allocate one's energy is genuinely challenging, IMO.
2. I think the seminar culture at Chicago was too combative.....although I think that a more moderate amount of interrogation is helpful.....nothing's worse than a seminar where nobody asks any questions.
3. Chicago in my day was a high-attrition program...I was lucky to get through, but then I also probably wouldn't be admittable by their standards today.
4. My ultimate advisor, Bob Topel, was more approachable and modest than Lucas (though also freaky smart). He once said something that I admired: "Unemployment reminds economists that they have a lot to be modest about." Both Krugman and Lucas - but especially Krugman! - could have thought that way more often.
We students thought of Bob Lucas as the math wizard. But his background was the liberal arts (hence the writing skill). He thought the idea that idea of agents in a model having the expectations of the model was so important that he taught himself the math required to build models containing the idea.
You left out one of the better parts of the divorce settlement. Rita's clause to split the Nobel prize would expire the year *after* Bob won it. This led many economists to quip that her "perfect foresight" in the particular led credence to the notion of rational expectations in general.
Those are excellent points to remember, Mike:)