How can I help depressed adolescents to choose the human capital investments that will maximize their adult earnings and help artistic directors to choose the artistically exceptional plays that will maximize their theaters’ profits? As an economist specializing in labor economics. How can I help patients with end-stage renal disease to gain access to potentially life-saving kidneys, help the obese to correct for the time-inconsistency partially responsible for their health struggles, and help the sexually active to escape the spread of STDs caused largely by asymmetric information? As an economist specializing also in health economics.
In Ancient Greece, “oikonomos” meant, quite simply, steward. In his 1970 fable Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach views civilization as the original steward of this planet, empowered by evolution. “A hundred years later,” Bach writes, “the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution [. . .] rescued the planet from intelligence, and handed it to love.”
When it comes to stewardship, Bach’s critique of intelligence and praise of love is perhaps overly simplistic; love certainly has its place, but love alone is often not enough. Parents love their children and wish for them the brightest future, yet parents of depressed adolescents often encourage their children to stay in school, unaware that for some groups of depressed adolescents the labor market returns to work experience may be higher (“Linking Depressed Earnings to Adolescent Depression”). Similarly, artistic directors love their art, yet, as I investigated in my Senior Thesis, artistic directors subconsciously discriminate against female playwrights, unaware that they are sacrificing play quality and theater profits. What love needs as its mate, then, is intelligent decision-making based on accurate factual data gathered and analyzed with high-quality methods.
As demonstrated by my research, I have a love of and interest in people, particularly children and women, especially those who are, for one reason or another, disadvantaged. I also have some intelligence, fostered by a well-rounded educational background with a Montessori upbringing, a decade in Montana’s Bozeman Public School System, and a stimulating undergraduate experience in Princeton’s Economics Department. What I seek now is advanced training in order to put this love and this intelligence to their best possible use. I will therefore be pursuing a PhD in Economics at Harvard with likely emphasis on health and labor economics beginning in September of 2009.
The real answer to “why econ,” though, is simple: It’s fun. Like, really fun.
