Andy Abel wrote a problem with dynamic programming, which was Andy’s main research area at the time. Abhijit showed that the supposed correct answer was in fact wrong, that the equilibrium upon testing was degenerate, and he re-solved the problem correctly, finding some multiple equilibria if I recall correctly, all more than what Abel had seen and Abel wrote the problem. Abhijit got an A+ (Abel, to his credit, was not shy about reporting this).
I am older than Tyler, and I went to MIT rather than Harvard, but this anecdote perfectly captures the atmosphere in grad school as I remember it. Heavy math, mathematical ability the primary source of respect. It was a system designed to produce idiot savants. A few students from that period, including Banerjee, managed to do useful work in spite of their training, but I still seethe about many of my courses, which were nothing other than a form of fraternity hazing using math exercises.
At many institutions, it got to the point that students who had zero economics background but strong math/physics/engineering backgrounds did better in economics grad programmes than the students who had majored in economics as undergrads. The math jocks had no institutional knowledge, no knowledge of the history of economic thought, and they had no concept of opportunity costs, or how to even consider practical policy applications. Worse, they were then thrust into intro classrooms as TAs with little idea of what they were doing.
‘equilibrium upon testing ‘
I have been stuck at this stage, finding seemingly stable points in the software testin process that I cannot explain. Many times I never got to step two, theory. Instead I got stuck doing days of more testing. And that is why we need idiot savants.
Mixed feelings about this. The number exercises are relatively harmless and have not had much consequence for larger society. The experimenters on the other hand seem to have legitimated the longstanding bigotry against farmers. Banerjee et al won fame with their paper that claimed African farmers were too stupid to use fertilizer even though the paper hinted at but did not disclose risk differentials in various practices. This launched a whole “farmers are stupid” economics literature promoted by Russ Roberts among many others. Findings in some minor discrete population are projected upon all farmers everywhere. It is like economists are attempting to atone for their sins in Russia, Ukraine, Cuba and China. All this despite more than ample evidence that farmers globally readily adopt agricultural science research findings.
You might have had more fun in the laboratory sciences. At least I did. There was still plenty of math, but there was also a lot of hands-on work making chemicals do things they didn’t want to do and coaxing a few more years out of machines that were well past the end of their design life.
This is a total over-reaction. Dynamic programming is a very useful and common tool in economic modelling and it doesn’t require advanced mathematical ability to do. There are plenty of high quality, not particularly mathy papers in macro (and micro) that you can’t understand at all if you don’t know the basics. That’s why it was assigned in a first-year macro course. The students were not asked to evaluate if the equilibrium was stable and non-degenerate, they were just asked to solve a problem. As for Andy Abel, professors in rigorous fields like math and physics also sometimes make mistakes on exams, it is not unusual or worrisome.