Shoshana Grossbard, Economist, Professor, Editor, Becker’s Student

I recently volunteered to teach a new class on the history of economic thought and it has been profoundly rewarding for me. I love economics but I also love the stories of its players, my tribe, the economists. This person critiquing that person, this idea twisting around that other persons idea. The idea I might get paid to study people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus? Pinch me — I must be dreaming.

What’s been interesting to me is how much I recognize. Even though I have never read Malthus theory of gluts before, it’s somehow eerily familiar. But it’s more than just seeing the traces of later theories in these early writers. Reading history is also helping reframe the broad story of economics itself — the story of capitalism, its tensions, the conflicts between people, the appropriation and division of surplus, and the organization accomplished through markets and exchange. Reading history helps makes sense of me and others when I see the full sweep of the times and the debates.

But some people are remembered, some people aren’t. Some ideas were dropped and some hung around. Sometimes they were omitted because the theories while useful and intriguing explanations then were not as useful as another explanation that would replace it. That process of what we remember and what we forget happens at all levels, big and small, and it too is part of the story of economics in a way.

This idea that now long gone economists were once in their offices working earnestly on ideas we have collectively chosen to ignore and forget is not itself tragic, though. Nor is what was selected to persist glorious. Both simply are. Most of the things I have chosen or done in fact no one will ever know. Most of the words I have said, no one was present to hear. History has forgotten more than it has remembered.

Nevertheless I want to know. I want to learn all the stories, all the people, all the ideas, all the ways that ideas are forged and changed and kept and passed around. I know that it sounds a bit dramatic to say “My people”. What a strange way to self identify. And yet it is genuine. I am an economist. It will say in my tombstone that I was an economist even. I am more an economist than I am almost any other thing. So perhaps that’s why I care about the stories of the economists — the people and the ideas. I care about the people too. I care especially about the stories that for one reason or another would simply never be told were we not to ask and listen with open mind and accepting hearts, the hallmark of curiosity.

I see my podcast as a way to collect the stories of people whose stories don’t show up in the footnotes of our textbooks. I do it around topics I care about like causal inference, economists in tech, and public policy. And one of the series I have been doing I call “Becker’s students”. I chose Gary Becker because it was Becker’s Nobel prize speech more than any other intellectual experience I had that prompted me to get a PhD in economics. He has cast a massive shadow over me. And my series so far has included interviews with two of his former students from when he was a professor at Columbia University: Robert Michael and Michael Grossman.

But this week I am talking with one of his students from the University of Chicago where he spent the majority of his career. My guest this week is Shoshana Grossbard, professor of economics at San Diego State University, and editor of Review of Economics of the Household.

This interview was one of the best interview experiences I have had yet. Shoshana was honest, warm, and most of all very candid about her career, about the history of household economics, the things that had major impacts on her, but also the discouragements in her career. That she would share both the highs and lows as well as her thoughts about economics as a science and its practitioners so transparently with me of all people was deeply humbling for me.

You will learn that Becker was an important figure for her, not surprisingly as he was her advisor, but like many important people to us who we’ve known for years, the relationship was also a complicated one. His influence cast a long shadow over who she chose to become, and I appreciated that she was so forthright. I hope you like this interview too. Please tell others about it! Don’t forget to subscribe and if you like it, consider supporting it!

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S1E30: Interview with Shoshana Grossbard, Editor of Review of Economics of the Household