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Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 28-Dec-01 12:46 AM
Since this board attracts a fair number of vocal and silent young economists, this particular articel from The New York Times may be of interest to them, especially to those who have spent a fair amount of time taking undergraduate and graduate courses at Littauer Center, the white building next to the Science
Center.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
**************************************************
Harvard Pulls Ahead in Economics Game
December 27, 2001
By MICHAEL STEINBERGER
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Last March, when Lawrence H. Summers, a
former Treasury secretary, was named the 27th president of
Harvard University, nowhere was the popular choice greeted
with more enthusiasm than on the second floor of Littauer
Center, home to the economics department.
"People were delighted," said Oliver Hart, the department's
chairman. "Larry has a lot of friends here."
It's no wonder. Mr. Summers, 47, is almost a pure product
of Harvard's economics department. While he attended the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate,
he received a Harvard doctorate in 1982, became the
youngest tenured member ever of its faculty at age 28 and
taught there for eight years before leaving for Washington
in 1991.
More important, Mr. Summers - whose sharp rise has given
him enormous influence in policy and scholarly circles -
epitomizes the increasingly important position that Harvard
now holds in the world of academic economics.
Harvard's economics department is on a roll these days,
attracting a disproportionate number of the most coveted
graduate students and turning out an equally hefty share of
the most promising young economists. Making it all the
sweeter is that Harvard's success is helping it eclipse the
profession's traditional lodestar, the economics department
at crosstown rival M.I.T.
"We feel we are currently winning the competition," Mr.
Hart said. "Over the past five to eight years, things have
moved in our direction."
Ben Bernanke, who is now the chairman of Princeton
University's economics department, recalls that M.I.T. was
long the premier incubator of economists and an
intellectual hothouse that thoroughly overshadowed Harvard.
Indeed, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the
1970's, even Mr. Bernanke's own Harvard adviser recommended
M.I.T.'s doctoral program.
"He told me that's where all the best students went, and he
was right," Professor Bernanke said.
That's no longer true. "Now, things aren't so clear-cut,"
he said.
One reason the balance of power in Cambridge has shifted is
because Harvard has made itself a much better teaching
institution. At the same time, M.I.T. has become, relative
to Harvard at least, a less attractive place to study
economics, in large part because it has suffered a number
of prominent defections from its faculty over the past
decade. The altered competitive landscape represents
another twist in a long, storied rivalry, but it also
reflects the changes that have swept the field of economics
generally.
In a sense, M.I.T.'s department is being victimized by its
own success. It has remained a small shop as the profession
it led to prominence has become a sprawling subject.
Moreover, the discipline's biggest names are now virtually
celebrities, with opportunities extending beyond the
lecture hall. Yet M.I.T. clings to the egalitarianism that
has always been its trademark; one former faculty member
jokingly calls it "the last kibbutz in economics."
Whatever their comparative strengths and weaknesses, M.I.T.
and Harvard, which each admit around 25 doctoral candidates
annually, still boast what are widely acknowledged to be
the two finest graduate programs in economics.
The rivalry between Harvard and M.I.T. is fueled nowadays
primarily by proximity and ego. "It's the narcissism of
small differences," said Michael Kremer, a specialist in
issues of growth and development who jumped from M.I.T. to
Harvard two years ago. And while Harvard is a more
politically active department, there is no real ideological
divide.
Both departments lean to the left politically, though
Harvard is more catholic in its composition: its faculty
includes two leading conservative economists, Robert Barro
and Martin Feldstein. Each school practices what is known
as Cambridge- style economics, which, while heavily
mathematical, is less formalistic and theoretical than the
economics done at the University of Chicago, which has long
been at the forefront of the free market school of
economics championed by Milton Friedman, who taught there
for many years.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 28-Dec-01 12:53 AM
Many of the professors and students in Cambridge have
taught or studied on both campuses, and there is frequent
collaboration among faculty members. Except during
recruiting season. "Recruiting is a good old-fashioned
fight," said Olivier Blanchard, M.I.T.'s chairman."It
usually takes a few weeks for friendships to be restored.
Apart from that, it's a state of generalized incest."
It's a rivalry, however, that was conceived in bad blood.
In October 1940, a remarkably gifted 25-year-old economist
named Paul Samuelson, then an instructor at Harvard, was
offered a professorship by M.I.T., which at the time had a
threadbare economics department. Harvard was expected to
eagerly match the offer, but it did not.
It was widely understood that Mr. Samuelson was snubbed
because he was Jewish. Even those who saw it differently
acknowledged that anti- Semitism was a factor. The renowned
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who was then teaching
at Harvard, remarked: "I could understand if they didn't
want to hire him because he is a Jew. But that wasn't it.
he was just too brilliant for them."
From his perch at M.I.T., Mr. Samuelson revolutionized
economics. Although firmly in the Keynesian camp, his
foremost achievement was to unite a century of economic
insights, many of them seemingly at odds, into a single,
coherent theory - the neoclassical synthesis, as it was
called - that would dominate economic discourse for some
three decades. He also wrote a primer on economics that, 50
years later, remains a popular introductory textbook around
the world.
In the early 1950's, he was joined at M.I.T. by another
talented young refugee from Harvard, Robert Solow.
Together, Professors Samuelson and Solow turned M.I.T. into
the institution that best embodied mainstream economic
thought. They were distinguished not just for their path-
breaking work, but also for their dedication to nurturing
their students.
From the 1950's through the 1980's, Harvard's economics
department was no match for M.I.T.'s. While it had a fine
faculty, professors were not particularly interested in
teaching either undergraduate or graduate students, who
often received little guidance. "One was hesitant to send
students to Harvard," said David Colander, an economist at
Middlebury College. "You knew they would receive a good
education at M.I.T.; at Harvard, they would have to educate
themselves."
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 28-Dec-01 12:56 AM
Consequently, M.I.T. almost always beat Harvard for the
most prized doctoral candidates.
In the early 1990's, however, the first signs of shifting
fortunes emerged. Professors Samuelson and Solow, along
with other members of the old guard, began to retire even
as M.I.T. lost some younger stars as well. In 1993, Mr.
Hart and Drew Fudenberg, two leading microeconomic
theorists, bolted for Harvard. Shortly thereafter, Jean
Tirole, another microeconomic theorist, returned to his
native France.
Meanwhile, Harvard was becoming a more user-friendly place,
thanks mainly to an influx of M.I.T. economists who had
been reared on the Samuelson-Solow ethos.
"In the past, if you were a graduate student, you really
took your chances coming here," Mr. Hart, the department's
chairman, said. "But the culture has changed. We're able to
compete with M.I.T. now because we have people who were
taught in the M.I.T. tradition and believe in treating
graduate students well."
In the meantime, M.I.T.'s faculty exodus has continued.
Besides losing Mr. Kremer, the department could not prevent
Susan Athey, a highly reguarded young microeconomist, from
going to Stanford University. It also suffered an even
bigger defection when Paul Krugman, arguably the world's
most influential trade theorist and also a columnist for
The New York Times (news/quote), left for Princeton.
M.I.T. now finds itself at a disadvantage on several
fronts. Over the last few decades, economics has flowered
into a broad, yet highly specialized, field. With some 60
full- time faculty, Harvard can blanket the subject.
M.I.T.'s economics department is half that size.
"It seemed to me that Harvard is a better place if you
don't know exactly what you want to study," said one
first-year student there, who chose Harvard's economics
program over M.I.T.'s. "It's got almost every area covered,
and in almost every area it has people who are at the top
of the field."
Small was once beautiful for M.I.T., but the department
also made a virtue of necessity. For all its influence on
the outside world, economics has never cast a large shadow
within the university itself. "No one comes to M.I.T. as an
undergraduate with the intention of pursuing a degree in
economics," Professor Blanchard said.
Engineering and computer science are M.I.T.'s bread and
butter; as a result, more resources flow in that direction.
"The administration has always been accommodating and
generous," said Peter Temin, who has taught economics at
M.I.T. since the mid-1960's, "but it prefers to put money
into labs than give it to people who just sit there with
PC's."
While M.I.T. pays top dollar for faculty, it has trouble
matching Harvard's generous housing allowances. Likewise,
there is less money floating around for graduate students;
some M.I.T. doctoral candidates even serve as Harvard
teaching assistants.
M.I.T. is also being punished for remaining true to its
teaching mission. The field, notes Princeton's Mr.
Bernanke, is now in a "race to the bottom" in terms of
teaching loads, with major departments requiring fewer and
fewer hours of instruction from faculty. Princeton
economists are obligated to teach two course a year. The
same applies at Harvard. M.I.T. insists that its faculty
teach two and a half courses.
That may not seem like a big difference, but M.I.T. is also
less willing to sanction the kind of outside activities
that are now commonplace for heavyweight economists.
"There are people who have left who I would have loved to
have kept, but we couldn't offer them what other places
might," Mr. Blanchard conceded. "There are departments that
are willing to bring in big names, pay them lots of money,
and let them teach one introductory course a year and to
spend four days a week on the road. That is something we
will not do."
But for all its comparative difficulties, M.I.T. continues
to attract plenty of the best and the brightest: Princeton,
Stanford, and Chicago still lag in the battle for graduate
students. "When I think about these challenges in the
abstract, I think to myself, gee, this is a real problem,"
Mr. Temin said. "But then, when I look around and see all
the talent we have here, things don't look so bad after
all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/27/business/27RIVA.html?ex=1010518046&ei=1&en=d1232c0465bff8dc
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