Not So Dismal a Science: Reflections

Academic economists tend to come in two varieties. One type identifies a substantive specialism at the outset of a career and continues to cultivate it. A second type is more likely to respond to the American Economic Association's twice-a-decade requests for information about sub-specialties by providing a number of differing answers over the course of a professional lifetime. I accept Adam Smith's arguments about the gains from specialization arising from a widened division of labor, but I am also conscious that Smith held that excessive specialization could contribute to boredom in the workplace. In any event, I am temperamentally a Type II economist who has greatly enjoyed working on diverse scholarly topics. I am also aware of a number of turning points that have conditioned my world with consequences that I could not have foreseen.