Every so often, we highlight one of the senior scholars that has supported the Young Scholars Initiative as a mentor. We share their perspective on the discipline, their past experiences as a young scholar and their thoughts on New Economic Thinking. This time, we talk to Arjun Jayadev, Senior Economist at INET and Professor at Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Arjun works on Macroeconomics, the Economics of Power, Finance and Distribution.
How did you get involved in the subject of economics?
I would say somewhat by accident. I liked economics, I did well in economics, but I was planning on getting a master’s and return to India to become an IAS officer. But I got to grad school and unlike many people, I really enjoyed my first two years immensely. That was partly because I had done my undergraduate by correspondence, so I hadn’t had any teachers for economics there. So when I got to UMass Amherst, where we had fantastic teachers and a really amazing curriculum, I really started having a great time. Plus, it appealed to me that economics as a discipline is “on the edge of science, and on the edge of history”, as Hicks puts it. I really felt that at UMass. Also, there was a great openness and ability to do many different kinds of courses and adopt and explore different perspectives. So I took classes for about 4 years! And the path afterward turned out to be surprisingly smooth. I think partly because I came from heterodox school and there’s actually a demand for heterodox economists and not such a large supply, I had a number of offers. So the market really worked for me. And after grad school, I lucked out to be in a great department (UMass Boston). I did what I really wanted to do, and it never felt like I was chasing publications.
That is unusual! How do you explain the horror stories we hear from other people?
Partly, I think it depends on what kind of program you’re in. If you’re at a “top program”, you’re learning things at a very advanced level, which can be really tough and not seem relevant to the social issues you are interested in. But what is probably worse is if you’re at a place that is not a top program but is trying very hard to be one. Because then you’re constantly trying to emulate something which you’re never going to feel good enough at. I think those are the programs that really grind the graduate students; they make them jump through hoops. Which is awful not just during those two years, but also in the long run. Because having gone through that is what later makes people extremely resentful if you criticize their work or they feel that their work fails to explain the world. They come to feel that since they’ve gone through hell for it, it must be worth something. On top of that, they end up in a crowded field, where it’s difficult to be seen. Whereas if you’re willing to stand outside the mainstream, at a program that is not trying to compete with the top, your experience may be better, and you may actually be seen more easily. Of course, your chances of being ‘accepted’ in the economics mainstream is very low indeed, but that’s not the purpose of taking an alternative path anyway.
How do you see your role as teacher and mentor?
For me, it’s very important that the students feel like they are participants in the process, from very early on. I’m their guide, but I want them to feel responsible for the research; it needs to be their ideas and their sense of understanding. I also try to help them deal with the concept of prestige; many young people struggle with this. Students I have seen fall into a trap of constantly thinking about the way a job market paper is going to go, how people think of you, and get swamped with the corrosive hierarchy that’s associated with that. And then it becomes very hard to look at your paper as a genuine scientific inquiry. Instead, it becomes a vehicle to attain some kind of status, and of course that is determined by so many other things than the quality of your paper.
I also really enjoy teaching–especially undergraduates. Due to the incentive structures in the field, many people view teaching as something to get out of the way. But if you have a class of dozens of young students in front of you, that is actually a significant group of current and future academics to be distributing your work to, and something to take delight in.
What differences do you observe now between young scholars in India versus the US?
Significant differences, but perhaps most interestingly, in the way that they go about their work. The grad students that I meet in India tend to be closer to something real in the world than those in the US, in the sense that they are dealing with a concrete problem that they wish to understand (say, irrigation in a particular state) rather than the problem being an instantiation of a larger theoretical or empirical approach. In North America, I think the job market makes it such that you have to write a paper in a particular way so people are trained first in the general way of going about answering questions and the topic at hand is answered in that general framework. The flip side of that is that the technical training that you receive in the West is extremely strong. That skill is much stronger in the US than it is in India. And the intellectual center for economics is still in the US, which makes the flow of ideas really go only one way.
What are some of the challenges you see in the area of new economic thinking?
I do think one of the challenges is that those outside the mainstream have a tendency to remain insular and critical. Which is okay to an extent–critical perspectives are important–but the most exciting things I think are positive impulses, where you are pursuing interesting questions and gaining new insight about the world; I think the focus should be there.
Another issue is that in mainstream economics, at least for development, micro, and labor, there are things like identification, which people coalesce around as a technical way to prove mastery. It allows for a clear understanding of the problems that students can be taught to solve, and once they do that, they can be considered capable and certified. The equivalent is much harder in alternative frameworks. Students there are not always sure how to approach their work. I have seen people working very hard but not be able to produce because they were not sure what their “craft” really is. There are not a lot of models to emulate. So they often fall back to producing something that is primarily ‘critical’ which is less useful.
How do you see the discipline progressing? Would you encourage someone to enter?
There are some areas of economics that are still very problematic; where there seems to be pure self-referentiality and no engagement with the world. But others have made a lot of progress and are valuable. Fields like micro, development, or labor have become incredibly productive and useful in the past 20-25 years, and I would really encourage people to enter that-at any place. In general, there are a lot of interesting people you learn a lot from; many of whom were not widely known in my student years. Social media helps with this, though it is a double-edged sword. In terms of pedagogy, there is slow but meaningful change. In terms of the field, the aftermath of the continued economic and political crises since 2008 have led to many different voices coming through. Places like INET have allowed those people to surface, which certainly improves the climate for new people coming in. I feel very positive about that, and there is no doubt that at this moment in time is one in which economists can fulfill very important roles.
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