Chronic Murmuring

The Lifecycle of Economists

Galenson and Weinberg do the study again, but this time studying economists - specifically Nobel Laureates. Again, the comparison is between conceptual work and the type of work where experience affects the peak ages when the best work is done. Here is the article. I'm reading it now, but I think the more conceptual work is the more theoretical work - your Paul Samuelson's who basically invent neoclassical economics with their Harvard dissertations - and the type of work that depends on experience is the applied empirical, econometrics work. For poetry, it would undoubtedly be someone like T.S. Eliot who at the age of his mid-20s, wrote the excellent "Love Song of J. Alred Prufrock." (I was wondering, too, if in theological work, you saw a similar breakdown. John Calvin wrote the first edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion when he was a wee lad).

Anyway, they find support for the theory that in economics, there are differences in the life-cycles and creativity. But I was looking over their sample, and it's a little bit strange. They have Coase in the "experimental economics" but if I'm not mistaken, he wrote his "Nature of the Firm" when he was relatively young (although "The Problem of Social Cost," from which we get the "Coase Theorem" [not really a theorem, but nonetheless important], did come later, and it's for that he has probably had a more lasting effect on the profession). And Douglass North is listed as an experimental economist, which does make sense, because I know that for a long while, he did a lot of boring growth work. It was actually in the context of doing that work that he accumulated the evidence needed from which he began to draw generalizations about the role of institutions in economic growth.

Ironically, it was after reading Galenson's and Weinberg's earlier study of painters that persuaded me to focus more on econometrics and applied empirical work than pure theory, only because I figure, being 28, I'm probably too old to be any good at that anyway. Plus, I was a poet for several years, and it taught me that I improve at something only after much failure and after much time. I'm more like a glacier than a cheetah. After reading this, I'm even more convinced this is true. I had written a professor the other telling him I was a bit concerned because I'm more of an inductive thinker than I am a deductive thinker. I cannot arrive at these theories simply by reasoning deductively from a priori axioms. Instead, I move from accumulating a massive body of data to the theory. In other words, I ground the theory, always, in the phenomenon I'm seeking to explain. Economics, as a science, hardly seems to me an inductive science, though, which is partly why I get a little frustrated. But it only convinces me of the desperate need I have of mastering econometrics. If I can really understand that science, then I will have the tools I need to approach the kinds of experiments I want to do. I'm still hung up on the most basic aspects of econometrics, though, that I am consistently discouraged about this whole endeavor.

I realized the other day, incidentally, that Stephen King's Misery is best understood as an allegory of graduate school - specifically, a doctorate in economics. It's so obvious now that that is what he meant that I can't believe anyone thought it was about anything else.