A denominator problem
Today I attended a series of lectures at NYU Stern, whose general energy and facilities seem to be on par if not better than those of Columbia’s b-school. During one of the talks, one Prof. Okun shared what he deemed Okun’s Law:
Never do anything that is not fun at least 80% of the time!
My brain wandered immediately back to my Thursday afternoon discussion with a not-unknown behavioral / experimental economics professor at NYU proper. Quoth him:
Based on what you’ve shared with me, having to slog through two years of proofs and theory in an economics PhD program might not be worth it given what you’re interested in. Why not follow the path of least resistance?
Clearly this man was unawares that I am a Scorpio born in the year of the Dragon!
You’re the sort who loves nothing more than to find a brick wall and beat your head against it until it falls, as it always does for you in the end.
But, two years out of five? That means only 60% fun.
Except — what about the out years? What of the twenty years as ANPhD? Will they be as enjoyable with a PhD not equal to economics vs. a PhD in economics? I flicker back to a phone call with Academite Trentie this past May or June:
People listen to economists more than, say, sociologists or public policy people.
True that. There’s a veneer of objectivity (not to be corn-fused with Objectivism) when someone says they’re an economist.
But slogging through proofs and theory for two years, well:
- It’s not like proofs and theory are 0% fun. Actually, I rather enjoyed getting lost into a proof for linear algebra during the two week un-refresher course in August. I was captivated by my need to untangle it, it was as if proving the dern thing was a splinter I needed to tweeze out of the underside of a foot. Total cavegrrl focus.
- It’s very possible that I didn’t care for the proofs in 230 because I was so depressed from the suicides that I didn’t have the mental energy (or perhaps even capacity) to anchor my brain to prove that an n-dimensional object transformed onto an m-dimensional plane would be a more efficient way to execute some process that I couldn’t even tangibly wrap my mind around. Now that I can feel an n-dimensional object as a sexy database, and now that theories can actually represent tangible processes that mean something to me, I have to wonderz: Will I still find them totally drudge-worthy?
- Didn’t I prove a fundamental trigonometric theorem as my required public speaking assignment for English class my freshman year in high school?
- Don’t I always ask my statistics professor why certain rules are true? Aren’t I always pestering for the derivation?
Plus, what’s the right denominator to use in order to see if Okun’s Law is satisfied? It’s really not about the doctoral program, now is it, folks. This is the rest of my life we’re talking about. Is, what, 18 months (two academic years) really so impossible to suck it up?
This is what I’ve been trying to prove to myself all these years, anyhow. I was telling a friend this summer that one of the reasons I have my panties in such a twist about all this math stuff is that I distinctly remember being in eighth grade, sitting on the floor in my bedroom in front of my typewriter, and drawing up a fake school district. (My dad was on the school board at the time so these matters were bandied about during our Sunday afternoon family station wagon rides around the countryside.)
The district had two elementary schools, a middle school, a high school (gee, wonder why). I had populations assigned to each school, some roads. I was trying to figure out:
- What are the optimal bus routes?
- What’s the quickest way to get all the kids to and from school each day?
- Which kids should go to which elementary school, and should we remodel the middle school or build a new one?
- And if the latter, then where should it go? (This was actually the exact problem facing the school board at the time; they chose to remodel.)
I sat there trying to figure out how to solve the problem. I’d come home from school, crank out some smutty short stories involving models from the Victoria’s Secret Catalog, and then look at this map of the fake school district and wonder how I was going to solve this damn problem.
At the time, I was taking geometry at the high school and Algebra II and Trig via Indiana University’s correspondence courses. I didn’t have the language for solving the problem, and Dad was getting his MBA and doing school board at the time, so I never thought to ask him for direction.
After a conversation I had with fellow JE Spider Rudi Seitz this summer while visiting MIT (Rudi’s on leave from a computer science PhD there), I realized that my teenage self was trying to solve the travelling salesman problem. And I have to wonder how things might’ve been different for me with just a touch more guidance and mentoring.
- Would I have become a topology God like Daniel Biss, who was in my middle school Topics & Research in Mathematics class at nerd camp?
- Would I have at least felt engaged enough to not drop out of the econ major as an undergrad after having completed the core major requirements?
- Or was it all moot anyway and were the suicides and other undergraduate events simply too much for my already burdened psyche to slog through?
- Did all my CPU belong to churning through existential matters with no room to focus on maff?
I say all this to NB there’s strong motive for me to step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Maybe I get beamed by fastballs. Maybe I strike out. Maybe it’s just a base hit. But there’s a part of me, there’s that awkward teenage girl that needs to know, that needs to try. Can I do it?
And what timeframe should I use for my denominator in trying to vet Okun’s Law?
Really what I need to do is follow the advice that a Baruch experimental econ professor gave me: drink up Mas-Colell’s Microeconomic Theory* and Royden’s Real Analysis. Then maybe I can ask my inner middle-schooler if she’s still thirsty, or if she’s fine with the idea of a PhD in Marketing.
* I love that there’s a scathing review of this on Amazon:
This book is a disaster because it conditions graduate students to think in terms of static equilibrium only. Of course, the authors might claim that chapter twenty covers dynamics, but this is untrue. Chapter twenty covers the oxymoronic subject of “dynamic equilibrium”. Joseph Schumpeter explained why capitalism cannot be understood in terms of any equilibrium model or “golden rule” back in 1912. The economists who hail this book as the best book out there, or even slightly useful, have been taken in by some very elaborate and mathematically sophisticated nonsense. If you want to learn real economics read Schumpeter, Knight, Coase, Hayek, North… anybody but MWG.
