As a graduate student, more than one professor sent me off to read Hal Varian’s monograph, How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time. I never did build a model in my spare time, of course, but I still enjoyed the piece. Actually, I loved it. My only fear is that this infamous little essay is headed for the dustbin. None of my graduate students had heard of it. So all you economics and poli sci PhDs out there, you now have a reading assignment for the weekend.
This is not your typical academic paper. Varian is not your typical academic. (If you need evidence of this, look no further than his current job: chief economist at Google. See his Freakonomics interview here.)
Instead, Varian gives a thoughtful reflection on how he works, and why. Here’s a sample:
I listen to a lot of stupid ideas—but that’s what I’m paid to do. Lots of people listen to stupid ideas from me, too: my colleagues get paid to do it, and the students get examined on it. But most people don’t have to listen to you. They don’t have to read your paper. They won’t even have to glance at the abstract unless they have a reason to.
This comes as a big shock to most graduate students. They think that just because they’ve put a lot of work and a lot of thought into their paper that the rest of the world is obliged to pay attention to them. Alas, it isn’t so. Herb Simon once said that the fundamental scarcity in the modern world was scarcity of attention—and brother, is that the truth.
In the end, he makes five simple points, none of which necessarily apply only to modeling:
- Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals.
- First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it.
- Look at the literature later, not sooner.
- Model your paper after your seminar.
- Stop when you’ve made your point.
A bleg to readers: what other writings and reflections on working and researching influenced you?
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There’s a similar paper by Avinash Dixit somewhere whose title I can’t remember that I really liked. The advice “build the simplest model possible, then generalize it” appears there as well and, for my money, that’s one piece of advice grad students most often ignore at their own peril. Always want to put in the most complex, most up to date, most mathematical stuff in the model, or try way to hard to make it “realistic” and in the end just wind up with a mess.
All of those are great pieces of advice, but they come with a caveat – you might not get published. Academics value pieces based on how much they further academic questions and disputes. Papers engaging with real world questions that may not have a lot of prior scholarship attached tend to confuse reviewers.
Elmore Leonard’s rule number 10 (scroll down).
The best advice I ever got was from Bill Foltz: good research starts with a good question, and if you let the questions drive the research, the models and theories will work themselves out.
On his blog Greg Mankiw has a section (scan right column) titled “Advice for Students”.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
I cannot remember where I came across this posting, but it has a host of highly useful and interesting links for phd students (including the Varian article that you mentioned), http://dinhvutrangngan.com/advice.html
A great book on this subject from political science is _Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics_ (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007). It is a series of interviews with 15 of the most prominent comparative political scientists born before 1950, all of which are both inspiring and useful for graduate students.
Yes, Varian’s piece is fantastic. I love how he talks about ‘using a word processor.’ But as the commenter above notes, Deirdre McCloskey’s publications on the writing of economics are also very useful.
I’d recommend that most grad students read either/both Economical Writing and The Rhetoric of Economics – both by Deirdre McCloskey. Having an interesting model is only helpful if you can write a paper that people want to read.