Last updated on May 2, 2022
My book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—but Didn’t is coming out in a little over two weeks on May 10. If you would like to have it in hand as soon as it comes out, you can pre-order it here.
With the publisher’s permission, I am sharing an excerpt of the book’s introduction below, after which I explain what the book covers, and how I am qualified to do so.
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” –Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum.
When I started graduate school in 2001, someone—I wish I could remember who, after 20 years—suggested I buy a copy of William Thomson’s A Guide for the Young Economist. Considering when and where I did my PhD, this was an excellent recommendation: At the turn of the century, economics had not quite yet taken an empirical turn and, consistent with Leijonhufvud’s (1973) tongue-in-cheek ethnography of the profession three decades prior, theory still had pride of place in economics. This was especially true at Cornell, where the Department of Economics’ leading faculty members at the time were theorists, from whom even Applied Economics graduate students like myself had to take their first-year courses. For me and many of my classmates, Thomson’s book was a treasure trove of advice on how to write, present, and review theoretical papers in economics.
Twenty years later, economics has become resolutely more empirical as a result of increasing data availability and the decreasing costs of computational power (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017a, 2017b). Nowadays, an overwhelming majority of young economists are drawn to applied fields when the time comes to specialize. Indeed, seven of the last ten recipients of the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best US-based economist under the age of 40, have been applied economists. Similarly, about half of the ten most recent Nobel prizes for economics have been awarded to economists whose work is mainly empirical. Economics-adjacent disciplines (e.g., business, public policy) and other social-science disciplines (e.g., political science, sociology) have followed suit, and have likewise become much more empirical. Yet there is no guide available to applied economists that does what Thomson’s book did for budding economic theorists.
Science fiction author William Gibson said that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Likewise with a lot of the information contained in this book: it is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. This is especially so given that many graduate programs in economics, applied economics, business, or public policy—programs that purport to train people in the art of doing research, writing about it, presenting it, and so on—do not systematically train students in what it means to work as a research economist. Even when one manages to glean some of that knowledge from one’s advisors and other mentors, it usually comes in bits and pieces, when those advisors and other mentors are trying to teach one something else altogether.
I would go further: I believe that when it comes to technical skills, most PhD programs train their students in ways that are roughly comparable. Where the quality of training differs between “good” and “bad” PhD programs is in whether students are taught the kind of interstitial knowledge presented in this book. In other words, there is a substantial hidden curriculum when it comes to doing economics.
My objective in writing this book is to help equip anyone who has the time to read it with some of the tools necessary to apprehend life as a research economist.
(Excerpted from Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—But Didn’t by Marc F. Bellemare. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2022.)
In the book, I cover writing papers (chapter 2), giving talks (chapter 3), navigating peer review (chapter 4), finding funding (chapter 5), doing professional service (chapter 6), and advising and mentoring students (chapter 7). The only things I don’t cover are teaching and the job market.
On almost every single one of these topics, I aim to share my experience with my readers so that those same readers do not have to spend their precious time figuring things out on their own.
On writing papers, I draw on my experience teaching our department’s second-year paper two-course sequence for six years. On giving talks, I draw on my experience giving hundreds of talks over the years. On navigating peer review, I draw both on my experience publishing 40 peer-reviewed articles since 2006 as well as my experience editing two top field journals. On doing professional service, I draw on my experience serving on departmental and college committees as well as on the board of my professional association. On finding funding, I draw both on my own experience getting grants as well as on that of colleagues who are known for their grantsmanship. And on advising and mentoring students, I draw on my experience seeing 12 students (it will soon be 14) through our PhD program since 2013.