Finding a Niche

Abstract

touched on book projects, sabbatical plans, and foreign travel. There was the security of a regular paycheck but, so it seemed, no one resembling a boss. Growing up in Berkeley had its distinctive aspects. An outing for the socially conscious was going down to the university and getting tear gassed. At about this time the high-school curriculum compelled one to choose between natural science, social science and humanities tracks. Social sciences were irresistible for someone growing up in this political petri dish. The natural sciences track, in contrast, would have meant more math. Early decisions have long-term consequences. UC Santa Cruz, where I was an undergraduate, was another child of the 1960s. Intended as an alternative to factory schools like Berkeley it had no grades, few major and breadth requirements, and little intellectual structure.1 Students were encouraged to design their own majors. This encouraged healthy disrespect for conventional academic boundaries, something that comes in handy for an economic historian. Santa Cruz also sent me for my junior year to the University of St. Andrews. St. Andrews students met periodically with a tutor to discuss assignments and read papers. My tutor was the Spanish economic historian Geoffrey Parker. In my senior year back at Santa Cruz, the department then hired as a visitor a brilliant graduate student from Stanford, Flora Gill, to teach a course in economic history. Put an undergraduate in an unstructured environment, and he or she will go in one of two directions. One is off the deep end, which for my classmates meant making candles in Ben Lomand. The other is in search of more structure. This is my best explanation for how I ended up in economics. Economics seemed to have more intellectual structure than the other social sciences, all of which, as a good Santa Cruz undergraduate, I sampled. Not that I ctually learned much about what economists do, San a Cruz not being organized to convey such knowledge. Sometime around the middle of my senior year there was a sparsely attended meeting of students and faculty to discuss life after college. Various poss bilities were described. One was to enroll in more school. A more novel alternative was to look for work. One professor who had spent time in Washington, D.C. suggested that it might be possible to pply what one had learned by working as a research assistant in a government agency. When I asked him how to go about this, he seemed genuinely shocked at having a student follow up on his suggestion. Write my former boss at the U.S. Department of Labor, he suggested. After some weeks, there was no response. Fortunately this member of the faculty had also been a dissertation fellow at the Brookings Institution. There the director of Economic Studies, the prominent tax-policy expert Joe Pechman, was losing his research assistant before the end of the academic year and was desperate to find someone who could begin in early April. I was graduating a quarter early and therefore available off cycle. I like to think that it was on the intellectual merits that I beat out other candidates for this job, but there is another interpretation. Joe Pechman was a famously successful example of how to do high-quality policy analysis with limited background in mathematics. Joe substituted intuition, detailed knowledge of the U.S. tax code, and an ability to write clearly and quickly for technical skills. He also moderated a Friday lunch at which a galaxy of Brookings fellows commented on the events of the day.2 In 1974-5 the conversation ranged over the first OPEC oil shock, inflation, and Watergate. If events like those couldn't awaken an interest in policy, it was hard to imagine what could. Brookings also offered its research assistants