Graduate School in Real Time

I loved graduate school --- absolutely loved it.  David Prychitko and I have tried to capture our time as graduate students at GMU in our introduction "The Present Status of Austrian Economics: Some (perhaps biased) Institutional History Behind Market Process Theory" to the edited book, The Market Process: Essays in Contemporary Austrian Economics (Edward Elgar, 1994).  [My homepage is going through revisions this fall and many papers and books which are either currently not available or available only at extremely high cost -- either search or monetary or both -- will be made available at the click of a button, including this introduction].

Technology was such that our "oral history" of the graduate school experience had to be saved in our brains and then reproduced on paper --- perhaps imperfectly.  But technology has progressed and two of my students at GMU -- Dan D'Amico and Adam Martin -- are starting a new podcast project entitled The MISEScreants.  In my experience GMU graduate students tend to enjoy the graduate school experience much more than say their counterparts at NYU or Stanford.  But like all graduate students they will have their criticisms of the process of transformation that takes place as smart undergraduates are put through a series of tests with the hope of producing good economists.  This promises to be an entertaining and provocative discussion by two very bright and insightful young scholars.

Despite the tendency of this sort of medium to encourage complaint and humor rather than reflection on the educational process (and I wouldn't suggest they do pure reflection because that will not be that entertaining!!!) I do tend to think that a little reflection would reveal GMU, with its emphasis on the rigorous and persistent application of basic economic reasoning and our traditions of interdisciplinary research grounded in economic reasoning, as doing an extremely good job at producing talented economists that can make sense of a variety of questions from the moral hazard problems in baseball due to the designated hitter rule (Brian Goff) to the problems with political economy reform in Kenya (Samson Kimenyi).  These are just two examples of fellow students from my era of graduate study who have made significant contributions to our understanding of the world around us through the persistent and consistent application of the economic way of thinking.  In the 20+ years of the PhD program the examples provided could be much greater in number and include topics from the failure of workers' control systems, to the operation of free banking, to the impact of term limits on policy making in Congress.

Anyway good luck to the MISEScreants in their experiment with the reporting of the graduate school experience in real time and I hope they will have a blast in the process of learning the economic way of thinking and how to apply it to address a variety of topics in every walk of life.