Romer’s Buffalo paper finally went out in October of 1990. He had changed his terminology and his mathematics, using some common shorthand techniques. The author paraphrases Romer looking back at this thesis. Instead of paraphrasing a paraphrased paragraph, I’ll just give it to you, because I find in interesting:
Remember my thesis, and how it was articulated, I had these general equilibrium ambitions, I was hoping people would pay attention to that, but they didn’t. On the other hand it was a little too abstract for the Solow types, the MIT types, who said, just give me the equation, don’t worry about the logic and assumptions. I don’t think either of those paths ultimately would have led to the clarification of what do we mean by an externality, as opposed to what do we mean why a non-rival good. That’s where the rigor and logic of GE math really paid off.
The paper was upstage by world events of that time, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapsing of the Soviet Union.
In 1989, Romer left the University of Chicago for the much warmer and sunnier hills of California. While he left without any job in hand, he was offered a tenured professorship a year later at the University of California at Berkeley. As the author states, he left Chicago where “there was confusion and resentment.”
A for Tom.
ReplyDeleteI'd sure like to hear why you find that paragraph interesting. When you don't explain something like that it makes me wonder if you were faking, and using it as filler. Why don't you comment back about this?
As to Romer's decision to leave Chicago, this is unheard of ... in the sense that I've never heard of any other professor doing something like this. Ever. Certainly not from a top a school. It's not that it's exactly hard to get jobs in academics ... but that it's a lot easier to move down than move up — and moving down means more teaching, less resources, and less of the research that gets you the decent $$.