My task today is to introduce myself, and let you know more about who I am and once you see that you can judge my complete application packet and hopefully decide to let me into your program. My hope is that when you read this you will say to yourself, “We must have this young man in our program! We should move heaven and Earth to make that happen!”
The task is hard, but not insurmountable. Hundreds of qualified applicants will be submitting packets this academic year. They are some of the smartest students in their home departments. They took the right classes, got good grades, and did well on the standardized test. They are, perhaps right now, preparing a similar document as I am with similar hopes.
I am better than they are.
Which is of course a very strong claim. Some may have higher test scores than I do, or flawless GPAs. No matter.
Maybe I need to back up a bit. I remember the afternoon of September 15, 2008. Over the weekend, there had been some negotiations but instead Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history. At the time, I did not have a good concept of what any of that meant. I had just started a job at a car dealership. Over the weekend, I was in training and the sales trainer kept looking at his little netbook and walking out of the room distracted. On Monday, we had an all-staff meeting where the owner said that we had faced economic problems before, and the dealership would persevere. Our job was to make sure we got “More than our fair share”. On the phone that evening, I was talking to my Mom on the phone as I walked my dog. She was asking me how I was going to be and I confidently parroted the owner’s words.
Turns out that confidence was not warranted. Foot traffic to the dealership dropped. We salespeople were working our way through the dealership’s database, calling anyone who had ever been in the place, asking them about their current situation. It was demoralizing for a new job. I was supposed to be on site for 50 hours a week, and I was maybe talking to three or four people a week. There was a lot of free time, not good when the majority of your compensation package was supposed to be derived from commissions on your sales. I finished training and in October, I only sold three cars. Then in November, I did not sell any as it looked like the disruptions of September were going to turn into a longer lasting problem. I was let go in early December.
December of 2008 was not a good time to find myself without a job.
Perhaps I should back up more. What was I doing in late 2008 trying to sell cars? The world is a funny thing, no? Well, it was part of a larger journey of mine. I have focused on various things in my academic and professional career. Academically, the main goal broadly has been a desire to figure out how the world works. I started as a chemistry major in undergrad in a very literal take on figuring out how the world worked. However, that did not sit right with me. The problem with chemistry and the underlying physics is that the problems at the time felt solved. There was a standard model of the particles that worked well and the investments in physics were in filling in those gaps. In chemistry, there was some interesting things going on with nano-tech. The real interesting things were in biologics, but that path led to working for drug companies and I had visions of just doing titrations for the rest of my life and that did not sound appealing.
So I switched to English, reading texts and criticism and working on my own creative works. I saw English as a way to leverage philosophy into an understanding of society, making the creation and dissemination of a text a social act – art as psychology and sociology and a unit of analysis in its own right. I liked that so much I sought out graduate schools in the study of English, at that time finding myself at Kansas State. I loved the atmosphere at Kansas State – the town and the people in the department who were my professors and peers. What I did not find was a good path forward in the discipline. Even when I first entered, there were warnings that few who entered would have a chance at the traditional end goal of a tenure track position. The stats were bleak then, and they have only gotten worse. Only one of our cohort followed through, and now he is at University of Texas at San Antonio. And he won! I decided early that I was not going to apply for PhD programs, as Kansas State was a master’s terminal program. Yet here we are.
What I did really like was the teaching component. Though I was lucky enough as an undergraduate to be a TA for the chemistry department, supervising my own lab and grading problem sets, being a graduate level TA in the English department gave me a lot more autonomy to work through the assigned papers in a journey where I was not an adversarial force at the front of the room, but as a partner in an educational journey where we worked on writing as a process and learned from each other as we discussed the broad subject matter that was the argument the students were writing about. It was a challenge, the lectures didn’t work all the time, but it was the most fulfilling day to day job I ever had, I decided if I learned anything from Kansas State in terms of a career path, it was that that academic track might not be for me but I was an effective teacher and I enjoyed teaching, I leveraged that to a position at a private school in Chicago. The problem was that one of their alumni got the English job I had applied for but the Chemistry teaching position was open and I was offered that. I burned out teaching that subject at that level in only a year. I wanted to stay in teaching but felt I needed a break, so I got a sales job. As we saw above, it was at the entirely wrong time.
I was unemployed for two years. I used that time to look for a job and to try to rethink just what had gone wrong, but I also used it to pursue the question about how the world works. This is when I started reading economics seriously. Like chemistry, economics for my teens and most of my 20s felt like a solved problem. Management of the economy had worked. In my conscious life, there had only been one recession of any import, and that was centered around 9/11, an outside shock that of course had macroeconomic implications. I know now that there was another one in the first Bush years, but that was not on my radar when I was a little kid. I had grown up in what was called the “Great Moderation” and everything had worked, right up to the point that it stopped working, and as a victim of that crash, I had plenty of time to try to figure out what had gone wrong.
This started my autodidact journey. I read contemporary sources about what was going on, reading the news and focusing on the financial pages more than I had ever done. I fell into the blogs, reading everything I could find from Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View to Zero Hedge. I subscribed to the Economist for a bit, but that was too light on actual economics. I tried to read the classics of the discipline, working my way through books like “The Road to Serfdom” and sometimes abandoning texts like “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” or “The Great Transformation,” the ghosts of Schumpeter and Polanyi looking at me as I eye their texts in my bookshelf right now with bookmarks for me to remind me of my place whenever I take up the reading once again. I read at least thirty books specifically about the financial crisis of 2008. All that reading and participating in the comment section of the blogs and eventually in conversations on Twitter showed me that at every level Economics was a discipline under contention. The Great Moderation gave policy makers the cover that they knew what was going on. One of my favorite lines ever in retrospect is Ben Bernanke saying to Milton Friedman in 2002: “. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.” Of course, we know that it did kind of happen again, thankfully they were able to arrest the worst possibility, but from where I was from 2008 to 2010, that was not very compelling. I tracked the data releases religiously, especially the unemployment rate and the component of the unemployed who had been unemployed more than six months. There were many of us, and not all found their way back into the rolls of the employed. To this day even with low unemployment, that labor force participation rate for prime age workers is below where it was in 2008, and that peak was below where it was in 2000.
Aside from paying attention to the stat releases, I also was able to redirect myself. I tried to get back into teaching unsuccessfully, and I took that as a sign to do something else. I heard about a retraining program for unemployed professionals through the City of Chicago, and getting into that helped the redirection. I took classes on medical coding and billing, being certified. At the same time, I interned with the city and with CSS, and organization that serves the developmentally disabled. It was there that I blossomed. I went from a billing coordinator to the Director of Finance as I took business classes. BY getting my MBA, I was trying to be practical; approaching the topic I had come to love but in a way that helped my own personal bottom line as my previous educational approaches had not really been directly beneficial to that point. I still work at CSS, though I have made a couple of parallel moves. I like it because I can use the skills I have developed and through the application of the things I know and can do I help the agency run and make sure that the people who do the direct service component have the support and resources that they need to help the individuals we serve have their best life possible.
It did not really scratch the itch intellectually. The MBA is a practical degree, in terms of learning more than anything the questions that need to be asked and who you might ask to find out the answers. The problem with the MBA is its breadth, as you do touch on some things but you move on to the next thing. It was good for what I needed, but I wanted to go back to school. I applied to Roosevelt because they are the heterodox school in Chicago. From my experience being on the down side of the financial crisis, I was open to the idea that the orthodox schools did not have the answer on how to stabilize an unstable economy. Thus, I am sympathetic to alternate readings of the economic system ranging from a Robinson-influenced Keynesianism to a Marxist class-based reading to a Functional Finance / MMT version of the macro-economy. I also know that to run with alternative theories you need to know readings that are more orthodox because those are the grounds you will be critiqued on in the profession at large.
A thing that does separate me is academically, I did not do the thing I see as advice – go to school and double major in math and econ then do an RA with the Fed and then apply. For better or worse, my education has been much broader. By having been in graduate school in English, Business, and Economics, I have a broad perspective. I have also become a better, more focused student as I have gained experience. Since 2010, the lowest grade I have is an A-. That minus sticks in my craw, but it was good motivation for the rest of my MBA and through the economics master’s program. I am invested not just in time, but financially as well. It is important that I get the grades but also that I learn everything that is out there from my peers and professors, but I do like having the achievements. It is so important to me that while I was in the economics program, I got in touch with the English department at Kansas State to figure out what I would need to do to finish my master’s degree. It has been long enough there was extra work in recertifying my old credits, but I am working on a thesis crossing over the disciplines, applying Hayek’s troubling of the socialist calculation debate to Asimov’s Foundation series – I am asking the question of what happens in the universe if Seldon plan is impossible. This experience has prepared me for deeper studies in economics. I can balance a full-time job, my elected position as a library trustee, and multiple priorities for school and be successful in all phases.
I am applying for doctoral studies in economics, but one thing I worry about is that I do not have a narrow research agenda outlined. I first got interested in fiscal and monetary policy in a crisis, but I avidly read at all levels from behavioralists to inequality to trade and development. I once joked that my program was in building up a coherent agent-based system from the ground up when economic actors break our micro-assumptions. I did start on a document that was an outline of things I did want to study, and I was at over forty lines when I stopped. I too work under constraints, that of time.
Absent a dedicated program, I want to talk a bit about my personal approach to economics. Marx famously wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” I like that particular these, but there is the dialectic in there. I want to change the world, but there is a first step. Before you go about changing the world, there is a lot that must be understood – Marx himself never finished his personal project but for better or worse he was able to change the world through his life and works. We study the world as scientists, but we are not purely removed from the world, we are part of it. This interaction makes social sciences different from chemistry or physics, where you can observe, theorize, and make predictions. The medium of our is human beings. You can observe, theorize, and predict, but protons do not make decisions. Human beings do. This interaction gives lie to the idea of a purely positive economics. What you choose to look at and what you chose to leave out have huge influences on your conclusions. It is our job as scientists to recognize this and know that all economics is partially normative. Housework is not part of the GDP because of decisions made decades ago, and now we talk about welfare gains from homemakers joining the workforce. We have to be aware of these interactions in all that we do.
We also have to be humble about the limitations of the methods of the science. For years, I had a quote of David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, as the header for my personal blog and Facebook pages: “We are, in fact, surrounded with dangerously oversimplistic monocausal explanations.” This remains an anchor for me as I try to understand the dynamics of the economic system that we live in. As students we are often taught to think of linear causes to processes — a form of “first this, then that.” I like to boil Harvey down to the idea that “It’s more complicated than that!” My current header quote trods the same path, telling readers “There is only one true answer to any economic question: “It depends”,” from Dani Rodrik. These two quotes illustrate my personal take-away from over a decade of studying the economy that everything is complicated and conditional in a dynamic process.
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