More Nordhaus recollections (yes, I know we're in a crisis of democracy -- see my next column when it gets posted; but I've filed and am now taking a mental break). So, reminiscing about two courses I was lucky to have taken 1/
As a college junior at Yale -- where, strange to say, I never got blackout drunk -- I took a seminar from Nordhaus and Tjalling Koopmans on the economics of exhaustible resources. I wrote a pretty good term paper! 2/
I used international data on gasoline prices -- which are very different across nations because of taxes -- and consumption to argue that the price responsiveness of gas demand was higher than the conventional wisdom suggested 3/
Anyway, thanks to that paper Bill hired me as his RA for the summer -- which was an awesome apprenticeship. Watching a great economist actually figure things out in real time -- there's nothing like it. (I also learned that great men can wear shorts in hot weather) 4/
So that was a crucial moment in my life. The second came in grad school, when Bob Solow gave a short course on new models of monopolistic competition. And at the end of that course I thought, "Hey, I could apply this stuff to international trade" The rest is personal history 5/
So the moral for students is, take interesting course from interesting people. You never know what intellectual doors they may open 6/
