Newsletter 2006

What brought each of you to The University of Montana and what was the Department like back in those good old days?

I have heard stories about a class or classes that the two of you team taught? Will you share with us a bit about that experience?

Both of you have had very productive research careers. Part of that success comes from projects that you have worked on together such as your book, Post-Cowboy Economics. What makes the two of you such a successful team?

RNB: Tom can speak for himself on this question (indeed, who could possibly dissuade him?) but Would say that one reason why we have gotten along together so well is that we have both been interested in doing economics in a way that was politically and socially engaged - call it practical, or applied, if you wish. We were both interested in putting economics to work through expository writing, i.e. explaining the economic analysis of problems to a wide readership rather than simply a professional and academic one (witness in particular in this regard Tom's KUFM commentaries). And of course the kinds of political, social and environmental problems we were interested in were much the same. We don't disagree on much, and for whatever reason, when we were thinking about and discussing questions, the result was pretty productive. We were able to divide up the work easily and so far as I can tell neither of us felt that we were getting the short end of the stick. In the actual writing process, Tom works at a breakneck pace and cranks out material very rapidly. I was often not entirely happy with what he produced and would edit it heavily (and, I hope, for the better - not in content but in expositional style). This would normally be a prescription for disaster, since most academics believe that their words are golden and above tampering with. Tom, however, appears to keep very little of his ego in his writing, and always responded mildly to my comments, even if they dripped with acid. His attitude appeared to be "Yeah, whatever. Just fix it up the way you want to and let's move on to something else." In that vein, anybody who has been around us very long knows that we both enjoy irony and are not fond of pretension and although I don't think Tom is pretentious at all, and I hope he doesn't think I am, we have both enjoyed the irony in pretending that we were or that we had other faults and foibles, and deflating each other at every opportunity.

TMP: I think that what Dick and I had in common was not only a desire to apply economics to contemporary real world settings but also a desire to strip some of the conventional economic cannon of the biases that developed during the first half of the 20th century as economics sought to become a "respectable science" stripped of political controversy. Often the primary point of economics seemed to be to prove that markets and private businesses left to themselves, unhindered by regulations and laws (or even cultural values or commitments to people, place, or profession) would lead to the best of all possible worlds. That is, economics seemed to have a very strong ideological bias disguised as "objective theory." As a result, it systematically tended to offer very narrow and repetitive answers to very important social questions. What both of us have sought to do is show that economics as a science need not have such an ideological bias and stripping it of that bias allows economics to be used in far more interesting and productive ways in helping to inform public policy choices.