The Making of an Economist

Abstract

As economists, we have an interest in and individual knowledge of the initiation process that turns students into professional economists. However, other than anecdotal evidence, very little in the way of data exists. This paper is a step toward providing insight into that process. We obtained our data from questionnaires distributed to graduate students at six top-ranking graduate economic programs -- University of Chicago, Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Yale University -- exploring who current graduate students are and what they think about economics, the economy, and graduate school. The 212 respondents were relatively equally divided by year of study. We followed up our survey with a series of interviews. Certain results seem unambiguous and worth repeating. Specifically, there is a significant variety of opinions among graduate economics students and among the schools in the survey, and there definitely seems to be a Chicago school of economics. There are also tensions between the emphasis on techniques and the desire to do policy-oriented work. Students believe that what leads to success in graduate school is techniques; that success has little to do with understanding the economy, nor does it have much to do with economic literature. We hope that this information leads to discussion within the profession of whether this focus is good or bad.

What is economics? Attitudes and views of German economists

“…The answers given by the European graduate students very much resemble the answers given by the American graduate students in the study by Colander and Klamer (1987 Kolm (1988) argued that the new success criteria were "whether an author is able to solve classroom exercises and nice little games". Zevin (1992) generally misses the ability to produce value judgments among American graduate students.…”

“…pure research), or aiming at policy advice. In contrast, Colander and Klamer (1987), Colander (2005) and Colander (2008) show that European and American graduate students rate the agreement on fundamental issues much lower than German economists. They even notice a slight drop in assumed agreement after students have entered graduate school, which questions the hypothesis of uniform opinion inside the university.…”

“The silent revolution:” How the staff exercise informal governance over IMF lending

“…10 Extensive research, much of it using surveys, has shown professional training in Anglo-American economics departments to be an important socializing experience in generating shared policy beliefs (Chwieroth 2010a;Colander 2008;Colander and Klamer 1987;Klamer and Colander 1990;Fourcade 2009). While consensus does not extend to all areas, these surveys show that belief heterogeneity tends to be less severe among Anglo-American-trained economists, particularly when it comes to a theoretical core stressing market efficiency and rationality, compared to that between American-American-trained economists and those trained elsewhere.…”

La formación del economista en Colombia

“…De la totalidad de los estudiantes encuestados que respondieron si habían cumplido sus expectativas y además si querían estudiar economía, se identifica que el 82,39% de los estudiantes de los programas de economía iniciaron sus estudios porque realmente querían estudiar dicha carrera; frente al 63% correspondiente a los estudiantes de posgrado de Estados Unidos (Colander & Klamer, 1987). Así mismo, de la muestra nacional el 79,61% de los estudiantes consideraban que habían cumplido sus expectativas con respecto a la misma.…”