Remarks following an introduction by Dr. Peter Blair Henry at the PhD Excellence Initiative’s annual summer research workshop, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The PhD Excellence Initiative is a nonprofit that prepares high-achieving college graduates of color for top-tier Ph.D. economics programs.
Thank you, Peter for that great introduction! Good morning, all, and on behalf of the New York Fed, welcome. It is a joyous thing for me to be able to engage with you this morning.
But before I do anything else, I want to use this moment to tell you about the length of the right tail of the skill distribution.
The person who you just heard is an economist of the first order. He is a highly sought-after organizational leader. He is engaged in both civic and corporate leadership at the highest levels.
But he also ran crossing routes at an ACC school, and apparently(!), he could throw it down in ways that the late great Bill Walton would appreciate.
So, you must realize now that it’s all downhill from here….
Before we go further, I should note that my remarks reflect my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System. And with that, let me turn to the task at hand—to welcome you properly to this event, and to our Bank.
The PhD Excellence Initiative has a mission that I think is extremely sensible. It works “… foremost, by identifying high-achieving emerging scholars (college graduates or graduating seniors) who demonstrate a passion for economic research—as well as the deepest commitment to bringing new perspectives—and preparing these students for the rigors of a doctoral program in economics.”
This mode of attack on the problem is, in my view, exactly correct. And it is important. I’ll start with importance, and then to why I think it’s correct.
It is important for the students whose trajectory it ultimately alters, of course. But it is most important in my view, as a way to continue a process that will deliver an economics that looks like us—as a nation, as a world, and one that works on all the problems that matter. That is the promise, and what I see being at stake here.
It is correct, because there is really only one durable way to realize this end state of a healthier profession. And that starts with winning in the first step of the game as it is now played. When I say “game,” I mean simply the current norms and practices of the economics profession. And when I say “win,” I mean getting into, and then through, a respected Ph.D. program.
Now, we all know the facts here—the numbers are grim. This in turn means we have, for a very long time now, implicitly left to non-minorities the task of studying the issues of greatest import to minority communities.
Do We Need Diversity to Get at Diverse Concerns?
Now, a beautiful thing about economics is that it is resolutely empirical, even in its theorizing. In macroeconomics alone, the biggest changes by far in how we reason about the economy have come about due to unpleasant collisions of existing theory with data. The Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s, and the great financial crisis each led to sizeable shifts in how we thought about the economy. So maybe, just maybe, the profession’s progress is not slowed so much by its staggering non-representativeness? Maybe the facts of the world lead all reasonable people—including the rather non-diverse group of incumbents—to take on all the pressing issues of the day in much the same way as any other group would?
I don’t think it’s a good bet.
In my own career, I have seen attention to pressing topics seemingly die off due to fashions in the profession evolving as they have. Growth, and cross-country income gaps, which are almost without doubt the most important topic for human well-being one can think of, have lost ground to many other topics. And here I think broader lived experience may well matter hugely. For example, I have no doubt that the economic impacts of climate change would dominate economics if the profession had more representation from South Asia and Africa. With greater diversity in the profession, I have no doubt that even the economics of criminal justice and human capital’s interaction with the carceral system would be richer, and also would not have been left nearly as much to the other social sciences. I have no doubt the scarring effects of recessions would feel more urgent to get a grip on if Latin American economists were more prevalent.
What I think is worse is that the topics that do get studied are almost surely poorer for it. When I look at our profession, I see less incremental progress, and more coming from giants who occasionally come along and really change the way we all think. Ken Arrow, Bob Lucas, Ed Prescott, and Mike Woodford are beacons for me on the macro side, and people like Josh Angrist and Al Roth, among a handful of others on the micro side, have changed the entire profession’s aperture and approach to key issues. Yet quite obviously, this is hardly a diverse group. So if we want game-changing thinking on the topics that matter existentially to some, but not all, of us—like how race and gender matter in our economy—I think it’s essential to max out on the talent we attract. This is a numbers game in my view. So…we need the numbers. The Glenn Lourys and Claudia Goldins of our world are still too much the exceptions to give us a chance at the next big breakthrough.
Let’s Talk About Us as Individuals
So much for how the PhD Excellence Initiative matters for our profession. Let’s return to why this initiative also matters for individuals. We see that it is an effort that starts by identifying those who have an abiding interest in our subject. This is key—life is short, but it is far too long to work on problems you don’t actually care about. So you gotta care—and you do.
PhD Excellence Initiative invests in those—like you—who not only have the interest, but have earned the credibility to be invested in. People who have demonstrated that they are going to grind. And it does so by explicitly pushing its cohorts to meet a bar, never to change that bar. This is what it will take to populate the ranks of professorships, of research departments at Feds like this one, and other places where you belong tomorrow—moving our thinking forward in ways that cannot be ignored. Why? Because you will publish in the best places, and people will just have to deal with it.
So now, Peter, me, and many others want you to be in a profession where you belong, where your ideas are engaged with, and where you are given the real respect of having those ideas challenged as hard as you’ll ever have them challenged.
Let me turn now to something extremely positive. Our profession may not be diverse, but it is very competitive. Its baseline problem is that too few come to our “tryouts,” not that those at tryouts are no good (which would be a deeper problem).
Competitiveness Means Forgetfulness, AKA, WHYDFML?
And PhD Excellence Initiative is to me all about “getting more of us to a competitive tryout.” This is why it can—and I think will—move the needle. Let me explain.
Ours is in ways a profession that embodies “what have you done for me lately?” (WHYDFML?) WHYDFML means brutal treatment at times, it means relentless pressure perhaps. But it also means a kind of fairness that mere platitudes and words cannot deliver. And that is why I think you will succeed.
It’s long been noted that hypercompetitive settings are almost unique in the American landscape as being the ones where, despite bias and barriers, minority populations have thrived—sports and entertainment most obviously. Good people cannot, in a competitive world, be kept down. They can be kept out, maybe, but not nearly as easily kept down once allowed or encouraged in.
A far less inspiring, but personal, example is that of my own professional life. I am someone unusual around here because I did not attend one of our most elite schools at any level. I instead attended a sequence of non-elite state schools. And even though I was taught extremely well by excellent economists, I struggled to compete with those who came with much better preparation—often from all over the world.
Eventually, though, I did see things come together—mainly through a grind that I committed myself to. I wrote a decent thesis, and then—and this is the central point I want you to hear: the job market simply reset itself. As far as employers were concerned, my thesis was “the last thing I did for anyone lately” (TLTIDFAL!) And that was the thing that defined me as I looked for my first research economist job.
And it got better. Once I had the job, my thesis was no longer relevant—my latest papers were the new “last thing I did for anyone lately.” Then I took on managerial roles, and my performance in those superseded what came before. And so on.
In that way, economics is a lot like sports: we all know it’s silly to place any weight on where a third-year pro in the NBA went to college. Who cares? You have three years of performance to look at now. But economics is like a sport where the talent-feeder system is a mess. So we miss out all the time on talent in ways that the NBA simply does not. If you have potential to ball out, the Association will find you. We have no equivalent system at scale.
We are instead a field where it is simultaneously true that the top schools place the most people in elite places—a premise that PhD Excellence Initiative accepts—and that elite performance is rewarded with less regard to where it came from. That second point means that all preparation pays off—even if some of you wind up outside the most elite Ph.D. programs.
So grind, people, knowing that you’ll get rewarded. We need numbers from your ranks in the better Ph.D. programs in the U.S., and we need completion and more students like you thriving in not just those programs but wherever you end up going. This can work. It will be very hard. But it, and it alone, due to WHYDFML, can and will succeed.
Thank you, and I wish you a truly productive day—and also that in a couple of decades, one of you will take Peter’s place, and another, mine.
