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David Colander is Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Why Aren't Economists as Important as Garbagemen?, The Lost Art of Economics, Economics (Irwin/McGraw-Hill), and The Stories Economists Tell (Irwin/McGraw-Hill).

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"The Making of an Economist, Redux is self-recommending. David Colander's work on the profession of economics is by far the best we have. A significant follow-up to his book of twenty years ago, it will become the standard account of what economics graduate school is like."--Tyler Cowen, George Mason University

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The Making of an Economist, Redux

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

ECONOMISTS HAVE BECOME ubiquitous. You turn on the TV news and you hear from them-economists say inflation is slowing; economists question the tax cut proposal; economists predict that a recession is likely. You pick up your newspaper or newsmagazine, and you read about economists.

As with many things ubiquitous, there is an ambiguity about what precisely an economist is, and what it is that he (most economists are male) is supposed to know. Thus, nowhere will one find a specified body of knowledge that an economist must know to call himself or herself an economist. In fact, unlike in law or medicine, where there are licenses that one must have to be called a lawyer or doctor, anyone can simply put the suffix "economist" after his name and call himself an economist.

One way of specifying who is an economist might be to consider who studies economics as an undergraduate. Each year approximately 25,000 undergraduate students (about 2 percent of all college seniors) major in economics. The large majority of these majors have no intention of becoming economists; they are planning to go into business, with banking, finance, and general management the most popular fields. So, undergraduate economics majors do not, for the most part, consider themselves economists. Most are majoring in economics because business is not an acceptable liberal arts major, and the undergraduate economics major is a surrogate for a business major. Another way of limiting the number of economists might be to restrict it to members of an economic association. That wouldn't work either, however, since anyone can join these associations-there are no restrictions. Pay your dues and you are a member.

So it seems that anyone can be an economist. The lack of formal requirements about who can call himself or herself an economist, however, masks another reality by which individuals who are economists judge whether or not someone is a "true" economist. For example, were an undergraduate student to ask an economist how to become an economist, he would tell her to go to graduate school. She might demur, asking, "Wouldn't it make more sense to go to Wall Street and learn how markets work?" Getting firsthand experience may sound like a good idea to her, but most economists would briskly dismiss the suggestion. "Well, maybe I should get a job in a real business-say, turning out automobiles." The answer will be "no" again: "That's not how you learn economics." She might try one more time. "Well, how about if I read all the top economists of the past-John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Adam Smith?" Most economists would say, "It wouldn't hurt, but it probably won't help." Instead, he would most likely tell her, "To become an economist who is considered an economist by other economists, you have to go to graduate school in economics." So the reality is that, to economists, an economist is someone who has a graduate degree (doctorates strongly preferred) in economics. This means that what defines an economist is what he or she learns in graduate school.

A Profile of Economics Graduate Students

To get an idea of who becomes an economist, let's consider a profile that Wendy Stock and John Siegfried compiled.

As you can see, each year somewhat more than 900 Ph.D.'s are awarded, a rate slightly higher than in the past. Assuming the rate of production has averaged 800 over the past forty years, and that the average economist works for approximately forty years, and that few economists trained outside the United States come to work in the United States, and that 20 percent of the students who get Ph.D.'s do not stay in the United States, then there are about 25,000 Ph.D. economists currently in the United States. The composition of this group is constantly changing, and each year a bit over 2 percent of the economists are replaced with younger cohorts, which means that over a decade the nature of economists is likely to change considerably, with new graduate students replacing retiring economists.

This table gives you a pretty good sense of who the graduate students are who are replacing the old economists. The first thing to note is that the percentage of U.S. citizens in graduate economics programs is declining; economics, like many of the sciences, is becoming a field dominated by non-U.S. citizens, the majority of whom stay in the United States to work. Notice also that while the percentage of women is increasing, the economics profession remains a primarily male profession. Another point to note is that most students finance their education with fellowships, along with research and/or teaching assistantships, although about 30 percent finance it themselves.

Graduate economics students attend one of the over one hundred Ph.D. programs in economics within the United States. The group as a whole, however, isn't the subject of this book. Instead, the book's main focus is the graduate students at elite graduate schools. These elite schools are disproportionately influential, and the students at these schools are destined to become the future elite of economics. This follows, since schools seldom hire from other schools ranked significantly lower than themselves, which means that this group will populate the top schools in the future and decide how economics is done.

Schools' rankings are generally well understood by economists, and conversations with newly minted economists often begin with, "Where did you get your Ph.D.?" Upon hearing where, the questioner will make a judgment about the quality of one's training and whether or not one should be considered a serious economist. (It's a bit like two dogs marking out their territory.) If you are planning to go on in serious economic research, you had better be able to answer that question with "I went to (fill in the name of one of the twenty of the top-ten-ranked economics graduate programs)." Otherwise you don't pass the initial sniff test.

Notice that I said "twenty of the top ten." The reason is that there are many different ranking systems. Developing rankings, and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various rankings, is an industry in itself. There can be survey rankings (done in a variety of different ways), publication-based rankings (with publications weighted in a variety of different ways), and citation-based rankings (with citations weighted in a variety of different ways). Each of these rankings can be measured on a per-faculty or a total-number criterion (using various alternative measures of what is determined a faculty member). With so many ways of creating a ranking, there are many different possible rankings. Most possible rankings are explored and published, since college administrations often determine the level of support they will give a program on the basis of these rankings.

Where there is general agreement about rankings is about the schools at the top, and six of the seven schools that I included in this study-Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Princeton, and Yale-are consistently ranked in the top ten. (They are ranked as the top six in a recent survey, and the seventh school in this study-Columbia-is ranked twelfth; Thursby 2000.) These elite schools compete vigorously for top students. They invite accepted candidates to campus, wine and dine them, have them meet with faculty members, and work hard to sell their school to them. Except at Chicago, which follows a somewhat...