Namedropping for the economists

...who (who knows?) might one day happen upon this.

JSM and I took a trip to the City last weekend, and in between “Wicked” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and various other things you might think to do when you have 48 hours on Broadway without children, we managed to have meals with four different friends from graduate school. One of them mentioned that they had found the following roast of Nancy Stokey online. This was written by my friend Jonathan Hill, and I had the honor of performing it at a skit show. My only regret is that I was not more “agitated” in performing it.

Nancy Stokey is a noted macroeconomist and author of “Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics,” among other such light classics. I myself am a great fan of her paper, “Reputation and Time Consistency,” having once been obsessed with reputation, but having only recently given up the hope for consistency. Professor Stokey has liquid nitrogen in her veins, at least when it comes to her students. I really like her. Her course was supremely orderly, and my performance in a class was always unusually dependent on the presentation of the teacher. I mean, some regression to the mean is to be expected in a class where the professor is calling it in, but my rank in a class was always directly related to the professor’s clear organization of the fundamental course ideas. She gets a thumbs up for organization. That, and she once smiled at my son and her face didn’t crack.

Annotations are reconstructed, but my memory is not to be trusted.

Queen of the Night
Starring Nancy Stokey

[Professor Stokey storms onto the stage, slams down a stack of graded exams, and writes a very low distribution on the board. The following subtitles are then projected during an agitated performance of the aria "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" from Mozart's Magic Flute.] 1

The Rage of Hell is boiling in my heart.
Look at these midterms! 2
You are all lazy, or not very bright. 3
Those who so defile this temple of worldly philosophy
Do not deserve to be called my students!
You will be cast out almost surely! 4
You will be deported almost everywhere! 5
You will be relegated to menial labor with probability one! 6
Cast out! Deported!
And sentenced to study in Hell with John Maynard Keynes,
If you do not imprison yourselves in the library!
By the ghosts of Hayek, Stigler, and Friedman, I swear it! 7

Notes:
1 Both Jonathan and Nancy are opera lovers. Someone told me afterwards that they had it on good authority that “The Magic Flute” was her favorite opera.

2 The midterm exam was constructed and graded in such away that if you missed the first step, you missed everything. 80% of the class (first year graduate students) missed the first step. Granted, the first step was implementing a constraint that was fundamental to the nature of the problem. So was the class stupid, or the teacher poor? I told you above that the teacher was not poor, and I will not cop to being stupid. I have a third hypothesis, which is that the class was in fact working very hard, but mainly on the train wreck that is James J. Heckman’s course on empirical methods in microeconomics, and a concurrent microeconomics course that covered an 800 page text in 10 weeks.

3 She didn’t say this. She actually said, “You’re either not working very hard, or not very bright.”

4 She and her husband, Robert E. Lucas, were known for their post-midterm rants intended to encourage those students who were going to drop out to get a move on.

5 At the time, I repeated a third-hand story about Stokey addressing what was, by chance, a group of foreign students. She was speculating on how to motivate students to progress in the program. She stated that the department was going to be hard-nosed about signing the university progress forms. I reported that she reluctantly noted that such a policy would prevent foreign students from getting their visas renewed. But that’s not what I had heard – I didn’t believe the original story, and had sent it through my own niceness filter. I later heard the story directly from two students who were in said meeting, who confirmed the real story: that she triumphantly pointed out that the department had the perfect mechanism for motivating the foreign students [cue aghast foreign students] but had yet to figure out how to motivate the Americans.

6 She also taught a mathematical methods course (almost surely, almost everywhere, with probability one).

7 I know they weren’t all dead, so I don’t know how to explain their ghosts in the library.