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Steven Landsburg Was Born in Philadelphia in 1954 and Obtained a Phd in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1979

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Steven Landsburg Was Born in Philadelphia in 1954 and Obtained a Phd in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1979 The Heart of Teaching Economics: Lessons from Leading Minds (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010) Simon W. Bowmaker, New York University Interview with Steven E. Landsburg, University of Rochester June 24, 2009 1 Steven Landsburg was born in Philadelphia in 1954 and obtained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1979. He has taught both economics and mathematics at a number of universities, including Colorado State University and the University of Iowa, and is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, where he has taught for almost twenty years. At Rochester, Professor Landsburg teaches undergraduate courses in introductory macroeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, intermediate microeconomics, and advanced microeconomics. In 2007, he received the University’s Professor of the Year in Social Sciences award for his outstanding teaching accomplishments. Professor Landsburg’s research interests include algebraic K-theory, module patching, quantum game theory, philosophy of science and moral philosophy. His articles have been published in the Journal of Political Economy, American Journal of Mathematics, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Communications in Algebra, and Journal of Public Economic Theory. His books include, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics (Free Press, 2009), More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (Free Press, 2007), Price Theory and Applications (South-Western Publishing Company, seventh edition, 2007), Macroeconomics (McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1996), co- authored with Lauren Feinstone, and The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Free Press, 1995). I interviewed Steven Landsburg in the coffee room of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester. It was the early afternoon of Wednesday, June 24, 2009. BACKGROUND INFORMATION Bowmaker: You never took a course in economics at university and hold a PhD in mathematics. How did you end up as an economics professor? Landsburg: I had a lot of friends in college who were economics majors, so I picked up a lot of their enthusiasm, and I was always interested and excited by economics, although I somehow never took a course in it. When I went to graduate school, I immediately fell in with a bunch of economics graduate students as friends and picked up a tremendous amount from them over the lunch table. I happened to be living next door to them in the dormitory, so I don’t remember whether I was seeking out economists, or how much of it was luck. And at one point when I was looking, probably unwisely, for a break from writing my thesis, I got interested in a problem in economics and ended up writing a paper (‘Taste Change in the United Kingdom, 1900-1955’) that got some attention. It was published in the Journal of Political Economy [in 1981], largely because I got lucky in that the data happened to show something. I didn’t have any tremendous insight and I didn’t really know any economics. I had just heard about this problem from friends, worked on it, got a strong result, and had it published in a good journal. So, I guess that got me started as a credential. 2 Bowmaker: As a student, did any of your teachers stand out as being particularly influential or inspirational? Landsburg: In math, Saunders Mac Lane was a tremendous inspiration, both as a great teacher and because one was aware that he was a great mathematician. Yitz Herstein, Irving Kaplansky, to a lesser degree, and over in the economics department, I spoke a lot to what was then Don McCloskey, although I was not a student there and I was not taking classes. He was tremendously encouraging and inspirational. I learned a lot from him, and he made me believe that I could do economics. When I graduated in math, I took a job as a post doc in economics at Chicago, and Becker, Stigler and Lucas were the main people that I was talking to. Again, none of them was formally my teacher, but all three were fantastically helpful and inspirational. Bowmaker: As a teacher, have any of your colleagues been particularly influential in terms of developing your style and approach in the classroom? Landsburg: I don’t think so. There are colleagues who inspire me every day by their intellectual feats and so on, but I think as a teacher I pretty much sprang full bloom. GENERAL THOUGHTS ON TEACHING Bowmaker: What do you like most about teaching and what do you like least? Landsburg: What I like most is the intimate relationship that you have with your students. It is the chance to interact with them and to have ideas flow back and forth and to believe that you’ve been able to show them new ways of seeing the world that will be with them forever. Anything I’m going to say on that will be terribly cliché, but it’s what I love about teaching. What I like least is sitting down with a stack of exams and grading them over a couple of days. I do all my own grading by choice and I think I’m the only person in the department who does that. I have TA’s but I don’t let them touch the exams. Bowmaker: Why not? Landsburg: For a number of reasons. One, I feel like it’s important for me to read the students’ answers so that I can see whether there are patterns in what they’re not understanding and that tells me what I need to explain better. But secondly, because my exams tend to require a lot of creativity, I’m not sure I trust the TA’s to know exactly what it is that I’m looking for, or exactly what it is that the students can be expected to have already known. I want to give a lot more credit to a student who has an original idea than to a student who’s just parroting something I said in class. And the TA’s are not always aware of exactly what I’ve said in class, so they can’t always tell when they’re reading the exams what’s original and what’s parroting. 3 Bowmaker: On balance, do you think that teaching effectiveness and research productivity are complementary or competing endeavors? Landsburg: I think they’re complementary, in the same way that teaching the flute and being good at playing the flute are complementary. Of course, there are tremendous exceptions in both directions from this. I know great researchers who are lousy teachers, and I know great teachers who are lousy researchers or less accomplished researchers. But, by and large, if you’re looking to take flute lessons, you want to take them from a really good flute player and I think if you’re looking to learn to think about economics, you want to learn from somebody who’s really good at thinking about economics and that’s usually going to be somebody with a significant research career. THE LEARNING PROCESS Bowmaker: How would you describe your understanding of how humans learn? Landsburg: I am well aware that there’s a great variety of learning styles and probably, like any teacher, I do a better job of catering to some of those styles than to others. I think I learned more as a parent than as a teacher about the great variety of learning styles. My daughter often was not good at learning in ways that I kind of expected all kids to be good at and then she was spectacularly good at learning in other ways. Of course, I observed her more carefully than I observed my students and cared about her more than I cared about my students so it made me much more aware than I previously was of the diversity in the way people learn. But, mostly, in order to learn you have to care about what you’re learning. And the one thing that’s common to most good students is that they want to learn. The biggest mistake that students make in economics, in my experience, is that when they’re confronted with a new question they haven’t seen before, they ask themselves, “What other question have I seen before that’s kind of like this?” and then they give the answer to that question. Those are the ones who have a great deal of difficulty succeeding and I think the difference between those who really learn and those who don’t is very often a willingness to look at a question and say, “Hey, here’s something I need to find a new way of thinking about it,” as opposed to saying, “Here’s something I have to squeeze into some mold I’m already familiar with.” Bowmaker: How do you assess whether the students are learning the material? Landsburg: I think a well-crafted exam can do that. I put a fantastic amount of time into creating my exams, which is another part of teaching that I have come to hate, actually. I used to be really enthusiastic about that task and it has become tedious for me. But I still put a tremendous amount of time into trying to concoct questions that will enable the weak students to show you what they’ve learned and also allow the strong students to show you what they can do that’s original. I typically tell my students that they are going to get about half credit for repeating back to me accurately all the material that they have learned. 4 Bowmaker: How do you check your own progress and evaluate your own efforts in the classroom? Landsburg: By watching faces.
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