Points of Departure

Macroeconomics and econometrics are tools for recognizing patterns in data and interpreting them in ways that distinguish cause from coincidence. What attracted me to macroeconomics were its noble goals of identifying the causes of economic depressions and of understanding how government policies can promote prosperity. In graduate school, I learned that modern macroeconomics required more math than I knew. Therefore, for years at Minnesota, I’d audit a math class each quarter. It was easy to select classes: if I sought to understand economics papers about X , then I wanted math Z. During math classes, I’d get ideas for papers or recognize how to solve economic problems that had stumped me.