Grad School: The Impressionable Years

Sometimes I wonder if I am an overly impressionable young grad student. Am I being indoctrinated more than I realize?

I mostly ask this because I had very little economics background before coming to Berkeley. I was hardly aware of any of the major debates or viewpoints that characterize different schools of thought. I didn't know much of anything about who the important economists were or what they thought. So first year was particularly formative because I came as a blank slate. My professors impressed, intimidated, and influenced me.

It took me a few months of the program to get a vague sense of the different styles of economics, to start recognizing names and lineages. One of my professors said that a Berkeley economist can't look at a market without seeing a market failure and proposing a complicated mechanism to fix it. That's only partly the case. What stands out more is whom we include among the most revered and celebrated past economists. It's not that the "Berkeley style" is something well-defined, but there is only a finite amount of reading you can do, methods you can learn, and discussions you can have, so the decision of what to include and what to leave out depends a lot on the school. Even Berkeley's econometrics is distinctive. (Click the link, you'll see what I mean!)

I like the so-called Berkeley style a lot, though with admittedly little basis for comparison. Part of my reason for writing this blog is to practice formulating and reformulating my own ideas and formulating my own opinions about other people's ideas.