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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Narrator] Welcome to
Nobel Conversations.
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In this episode,
Josh Angrist and Guido Imbens,
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sit down with Isaiah Andrews
to discuss the key ingredients
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in their Nobel-winning collaboration.
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Josh and Guido, first congratulations
on the Nobel Prize!
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Thank you.
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- [Isaiah] The work you did together,
particularly the work
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on the Local Average Treatment Effect,
or LATE framework
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was cited as one of the big reasons
you won the prize.
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At the same time, you only
overlapped at Harvard for a year--
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if I'm remembering correctly--
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it would be great to hear a bit more
about how you started this collaboration
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and what made your working
relationship productive.
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Are there ways in which you felt like
you complimented each other,
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what got things started
on such a productive, trajectory?
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Your job talk, as I recall, Guido,
it wasn't very interesting
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but I think it was
a choice-based sampling--
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It was. It was.
[laughter]
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I was a very marginal hire there
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because they didn't
actually interview me
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on the regular job market,
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but I think they were very desperate
to get someone else
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to actually teach their courses.
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It was after they had
a couple of seminars already
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and they're still looking
in econometrics,
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- ...so Gary called me and kind of--
- [Josh] Gary Chamberlain?
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Gary Chamberlain called me and
interviewed me over the telephone.
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He said, "Okay, well, why don't you
come out and give a talk?"
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- [Josh] I remember this talk
a little bit.
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I remember the dinner that
you and Gary and I had.
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I remember not being very excited
about your job market paper,
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but I saw that Gary was and luckily,
Gary's view prevailed...
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Yes.
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- [Josh] ...and Harvard
made you an offer
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and I think we started talking to
each other pretty pretty soon after
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you arrived in the fall of 1990, right?
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As I said, I came
and I didn't have a very clear agenda.
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I was a little intimidated getting there.
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But Gary kind of said,
"No, you should talk to Josh."
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You should go to the labor seminar,
kind of see what these people do.
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They're doing very
interesting things there."
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I listened to Gary.
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As we did.
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As we did in the those days
and ever since.
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I think it helped that
we were neighbors.
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We both lived in Harvard's
junior faculty housing,
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partly because housing costs
were very high in Cambridge
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relative to our salary,
which was very low.
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I think it also made a difference,
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neither of us came from Cambridge,
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so there were a lot of MIT people
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who already had their whole networks,
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kind of our collaborators.
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Josh] Well, I think we had figured out
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a mode of working together, also.
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We had kind of a regular date,
so we were neighbors
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and we often did
our laundry together.
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We didn't have laundry
machines at our apartments.
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But we used to do our laundry
and we were talking
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and you had a way
of fairly systematically,
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addressing questions that
would come up in our discussions
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and the one thing that
I was very impressed by,
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our early interaction,
is you would follow up.
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You would write some things down.
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Looking back at those days,
sort of clearly,
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I just had a lot more time
to actually think.
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- I look at my junior colleagues now--
- You don't have time to think now.
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No, but for me that is
kind of one thing,
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but I feel now a lot of
my junior colleagues
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don't actually have a lot
of time to think.
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People are just doing
so many projects,
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and it's actually so hard
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and there's so much pressure
on people to publish.
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I remember spending a lot of time
sitting in my office
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and thinking,
"Wow, what shall I do now?"
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[laughter]
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But it would give me a lot of time
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to actually think about these problems
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and trying to figure it them out
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and I could actually go to seminars
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and then the next day have coffee
or lunch with Josh or Gary
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and actually talk about those things.
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- [Isaiah] You guys weren't actually
at Harvard together all that long,
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you started working
together pretty quickly.
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Were you both in the mindset that
you were looking for co-authors,
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or looking for a particular type
of types of co-authors at the time
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or was it more sort of
fortuitous than that?
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- [Josh] I think we were lucky.
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I don't remember that I was looking.
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I think, it was more fortuitous.
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I said I came in,
I'd done my job market paper,
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and another paper for my thesis
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and I was just very happy
to come to Harvard
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and suddenly there were all these
seminars to go to,
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and lots of interesting people
to talk to,
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but it wasn't a very
conscious thing on my part.
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Looking back, I think there
was a moment for me,
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where I was discussing
instrumental variables,
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potential outcomes,
treatment effects with Guido
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and we had a pretty good discussion,
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but then he also sent me some notes
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and the notes were very methodical
write-up of our discussion
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and what you thought
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we had been concluding
in a fairly formal way
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and I thought, "Well, that's great."
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Talk is cheap, right,
but with somebody...
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- [Guido] Yeah, but--
- ...really writes out their story.
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- [Guido] For me, it really helps
writing things down
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and I do remember working with Josh
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and sitting in my office
and writing things out
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and you guys have all
had the discussions with Gary
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where afterwards we need
to then sit down
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and actually write things up
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to figure out exactly
what was going on.
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I think the other thing we had,
Guido,
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is we had some
very concrete questions
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that came from applications.
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- [Guido] Yeah.
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A lot of econometrics, in my view,
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that we were schooled in
was about models,
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here's a model and what can
you say about this model?
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I think we were thinking about,
here's a particular scenario,
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draft eligibility is an instrument
for whether you serve in the Army.
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What do we learn from that?
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- [Guido] That's right.
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That's right, and that's sort of
where your influence
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on the way I do research now
is still very clear--
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Isaiah] I guess zooming out
a little bit, just thinking about
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when you guys started
working on this,
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when you started working together,
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any thoughts for folks
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who are just interested in
finding productive
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co-authors being productive?
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I mean, Guido already mentioned
the importance of having time,
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right, which it is.
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It is very easily not to have
a lot of time to think--
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You definitely have to make time.
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That's a great question though,
Isaiah,
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and I tell my students that
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you should pick your co-authors
as carefully,
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maybe more carefully
than you pick your spouse.
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You want to find co-authors who,
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you have some complementarity
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and that's what makes
a strong relationship.
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You don't want to work with somebody
who sees the world exactly like you
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and as much as Guido
and I agree about things,
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we often disagree
about things to this day
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and it's fruitful to have
those discussions
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and we had complimentary skills.
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I was very empirical.
I'm not really an abstract thinker.
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Guido was great at figuring out
what the principles were.
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Yeah, that's right and I totally
agree, kind of [inaudible]
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These are incredibly
important relationships
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and you see a lot of
people working together
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and not necessarily working
very well
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and then it's very hard often
to get out of this relationship.
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A good partnering is a
beautiful thing, like a marriage.
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It produces wonderful children,
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the fruits of the scholarship are
potentially wonderful
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and they exceed the capacity of the
partners to do it on their own
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but a bad co-authorship
can be very destructive
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and time consuming and painful,
just like a bad marriage.
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Arguments may start about
who did what when
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and intellectual property
type issues,
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especially when it when
it goes a little sour
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and somebody thinks the other party
is not pulling their weight.
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There's more co-authorship
now in economics,
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I think that's been documented,
much more.
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- [Guido] Yes.
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There's more teams
and there's larger teams
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and I think that's great,
I love working on teams.
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We do work on schools
with big teams.
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I work often with PI teammates
like Parag Pathak and David Autor
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and then a team of
graduate students,
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but I see that the students
are not always,
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in some ways they're a little
too promiscuous,
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in my view, in their partnering.
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They don't think it through.
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It's difficult to think it's through.
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I think, for me, working
with people always has involved
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spending a lot of one-on-one
time with people,
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you need to figure out
how they think
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and what kind of problems
are interesting
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and how they think about
these problems,
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how they like to write,
to make that--
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And it takes some maturity on
everybody's part.
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Yes. Yes.
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In what sense?
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Just in the sense of knowing
what's going to work for them,
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knowing when things are
versus aren't working?
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- [Josh] Maturity in the
sense of having some judgment
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to be able to face it honestly,
if it's not going well,
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sometimes you have to have
some difficult discussions.
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Is it worth continuing?
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"I was hoping you would do this,
and you didn't,"
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maybe it turns out
there's some feeling
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in the other direction,
the same way.
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And Josh is very good
[chuckles]
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in the being honest,
part from the beginning,
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- [Josh] For better or worse.
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- [Guido] I would write this stuff
and then I remember the
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first version of the paper
with Rubin,
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Josh was in Israel at the time,
Don and I were in Cambridge
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and so I would talk
with Don regularly,
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but Don wasn't really doing
much writing in those days,
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I would write things
and then I would fax them to Josh
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and they would come back,
first page just one big cross, No,
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second page, one big line, No
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and that would go for awhile
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but he still does that.
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I sent him the first draft
of my Nobel lecture,
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and Josh goes, No, no!
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I've gotten some PDF comments
like that from Josh, very helpful.
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Omit needless words.
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I have few co-authors
who are willing to do that.
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Especially as you get older,
it's harder to put up with that.
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I would find it harder now to start
working with people who did that
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early on in a co-author relationship.
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It's also very hard because
you need to have enough trust.
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Josh, for being willing
to be very critical,
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he was also willing
to admit being wrong.
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Josh] But you have to be on
the lookout for good partners,
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somebody who can help you
answer questions
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that you can't answer yourself.
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I think there's a natural tendency
for people to gravitate
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to people who are similar
in outlook and skills
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and that's not as useful
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Josh is right, nowadays
it's very tempting
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to find people who think
about the same problems
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you're already thinking about,
who think along the same lines
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and that may not lead
to very novel stuff.
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But at the same time finding people
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who actually have
very different ideas,
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it's going to take a lot of time.
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Guido, you mentioned in passing
how working with Josh
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has influenced how you do research,
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could you say a little more
about that?
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I'd also be interested
to hear from Josh,
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did working with Guido influence
the way that you do research?
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- [Guido] Nowadays, I'm much
more conscious of the fact that,
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for me, good economic research
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comes out of talking to people
doing empirical work,
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and it's really not reading
econometrica
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or the reading the stats journals,
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but it's actually talking to people
doing empirical work,
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going to the empirical seminars.
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When I was at Berkeley,
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David Carr and Raj Chetty,
as colleagues there
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and I would talk to them
and listen to them,
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trying to figure out
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how are they solving their problems
and other things there
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where I'm not really quite happy
with the way they're doing things
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and trying to look for
methodological problems,
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where there's some more
general solutions possible.
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I tried to tell it to my students
that I encourage them to work
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as research assistants also,
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for the people doing empirical work
at Stanford.
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There was no [subbing]
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but that I learned while
I was in graduate school,
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but it really came out of
working with Josh.
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as well as talking to Gary,
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Gary us was always encouraging
of doing that
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and because he done that himself,
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he'd worked with on empirical
problems with Zvi Griliches
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early in his career.
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Yeah.
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Well, I became more more interested
in the econometric theory
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through our interaction,
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and I think empiricists are often
impatient with econometric theory,
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partly because empirical work is
very time-consuming,
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and you may have a sense
that something is
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convincing and sensible
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and you haven't really fully
made the case for that,
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but you're convinced
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and that motivates you to pursue it,
like the draft lottery story.
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I was pretty sure that was
worth doing
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and I came away from
working with Guido
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seeing that there was
the potential to say something
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more than just about
that particular problem,
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and I think over the those early
years in the 90s,
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our thinking evolved together
that there's actually a framework,
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a way to solve a lot of problems
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and I think that that is the power
of the late framework,
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is it answers a lot of questions
in some sense.
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♪ [music] ♪
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In some sense, did you find that,
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email versus facts versus in-person,
the medium mattered
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to how collaboration went
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or they're ways that you felt like
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it was the most useful
to collaborate?
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To me, I think what matters most is,
initially you have a period--
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We needed that initial period,
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that was very intense with
almost daily interaction
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and we also became friends.
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You don't develop the kind of
friendship, electronically usually
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but once you have that foundation
you can be pen pals
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and we did use e-mail,
though it wasn't as useful then
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but it worked,
but we definitely had a lot of faxes.
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I still have these faxes, long faxes
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and then in the summer,
I would come to Cambridge,
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usually to the NBR meetings
and hang around for a few weeks
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and you visited me in Israel.
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I visited in Israel.
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But yeah, there was good foundation
from that that year
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and in some sense that was enough.
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and nowadays,
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I have the co-authors
in lots of different places,
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but it's always been important
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to spend some time with people
in the same place each year.
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You understand how they work,
how they think,
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even to the point that,
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you know when they actually respond,
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whether they respond quickly
or whether that means,
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they're not actually doing anything
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or that mean they're thinking hard
about a problem
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and they just take take longer.
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but you do need to
develop some understanding there.
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♪ [music] ♪
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We've talked about
how your collaboration started,
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maybe just to step back slightly
were they're sort of features about
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the environment at Harvard
or in Cambridge, at the time,
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which you felt like contributed to it?
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Coming from Brown,
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I felt it was very intimidating place
because it clearly was a very, very
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impressive set of people.
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Zvi Griliches was there,
Dale Jorgensen--
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Gary, Jerry Hausman, Whitney Newey,
sometimes Jamie Robins.
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I mean, my view of that
in retrospect,
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I can't say I loved every
minute of every talk
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I ever gave in that Workshop,
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but that was the highest powered,
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that was the group
you wanted to reach...
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- [Guido] Yeah.
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And you would get extraordinarily
insightful feedback,
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even if it wasn't always
easy to swallow.
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Yeah, and I have for a while,
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I would basically give
a talk every semester
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because we didn't have any money
to be inviting people.
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Gary would say,
"Well, why don't you give a talk?"
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[laughter]
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That was the arena for young people
with our interest.
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- [Guido] Yeah, it was really
very impressive,
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but it was quite tough--
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It was intimidating.
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People there had very strong
views on what they thought was
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the way you should do econometrics,
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the way the direction
things should go,
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now, I would think things were
getting a little stale that in fact,
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we were bringing in a lot
of the new ideas...
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- [Josh] Yeah.
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...and that wasn't necessary
immediately appreciated.
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- [Josh] But that's okay.
- And that's fine.
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We were pushed
and a lot of great discussions
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in that workshop about
what should we make of late?
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But there were other questions
that were just as interesting,
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like the role of
the propensity score,
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that was a big deal in the 90s
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and econometrics was
moving towards that
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and there were a lot
of great questions.
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Yeah,
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I learned a huge amount
there from the time I spent--
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- [Josh] I think the other thing
that Guido and I
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both benefited from is we both,
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not at the same time, but in
early in our careers, taught
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econometrics with Gary Chamberlain,
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and that was like an
apprenticeship for us, I think.
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I taught a mixed graduate,
undergrad 1126,
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I don't know if they still have
that number,...
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- [Isaiah] Ahuh, they do.
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...very interesting course that it had
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both graduate and undergraduate
enrollment
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and it was relatively applied for
an econometrics class,
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and I learned a lot by teaching
that with Gary.
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But in that sense,
Harvard was a great place,
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very flexible there.
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The other thing I remember
about Harvard is,
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well I had very good students,
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I taught a lot of wonderful students
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who went on to have
wonderful careers.
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Also, Harvard as an institution,
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you're probably are aware of this,
Isaiah,
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as a junior faculty member,
they didn't then ask much of us,
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other than teaching our classes.
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We didn't have administrative concerns,
to speak of.
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I think I went to two faculty meetings
in my two years at Harvard
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and so we're left--
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You were given a lot of freedom
and flexibility.
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I went to the chair said,
"Can I teach this course with Rubin?"
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I think it was Friedman
at the time. It was like, "Fine."
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It wasn't really any concern about
what what it was about
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and again, that was a very
intimidating experience,
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but it was a great experience.
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♪ [music] ♪
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