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It has probably barely been noticed outside the bubble of economics, but, since the beginning of this year, two very prominent economists have taken their life. And I must admit that this has affected me very deeply. So the question is why? /
After all, I knew none of both personally. OK, given my own field of specialization, I knew Martin Weitzman's work, and I have been in awe for his intellect for almost a quarter of a century. But I had only seen him in person twice (including a few months ago, though) /
I guess that the key issue is that both suicides are a brutal confrontation with the question what we aim/hope to achieve. I profoundly dislike it when people ask "why did he kill himself, while he had a perfect life" (just as if we know anything about what someone else /
is going through). But we cannot avoid the question: why do people who are widely admired for their achievements think that their life is no longer worth living? We can only speculate about medical or personal issues that are none of our business anyway /
But it did strike me that, in the case of Weitzman, people did mention that he had been severely disappointed when he had been looked over for the Nobel prize last year, and that he had also the feeling that his creative intellectual powers were diminishing /
I have seen some tweeps (including several people I know and appreciate) pointing out that Weitzman's death is a stark reminder that we should not identify with our achievements. While I completely agree with those statements in principle, the truth is that they run completely /
counter to the way scientific professions work. Seriously. The first step in a scientific career is the PhD, a harrowing experience, compared to which an army boot camp is a cakewalk (I have been through both, and I don't use this as a hyperbole) /
Seriously, folks. You are being asked to work for four years on a topic without knowing whether this work will result in anything. You have the constant fear that someone else is working on the same topic, but has better ideas than you /
(or worse, that the question has already been tackled, but that you have missed the reference). There's the fear that you use flawed data (not a hypothetical problem, as we have seen just last week with the Excel-gene issue). There's the fear that, somewhere in hundreds/
of line of mathematical deductions or thousands of line of computer code, there's a mistake hidden that will only be noticed when it's too late. On top of that, comes an increasing feeling of social isolation (the circle of people who have the slightest idea what you're/
talking about becomes smaller and smaller). And, after having been the smartest (or second smartest) kid in class for most of your life, you are being confronted with the fact that you're actually a minnow compared to the great minds in your field /
To be sure, that doesn't mean that there are no positive aspects to a scientific career. What I really want to emphasize is that it takes a very specific kind of person to embark on one, and that one's intellect is just one aspect /
In a profession where gratification is extremely delayed, it takes an extreme level of self motivation to achieve anything. This self motivation can result from a deep intrinsic interest in the topic, but let's be honest: vanity is key as well /
No, seriously. We may laugh with people who pay money to have a personalized license plate, but why do we have all those discussions about the order of the author's names on published papers? It's not because this has an impact on the scientific relevance of the paper /
Add to this the extremely competitive nature of the academic system (especially in the top institutions), and you cannot avoid but concluding that someone who doesn't identify with his scientific identity will simply not embark on this career (or will not stay). So there's a /
strong selection bias. I would therefore submit the hypothesis that people in scientific careers are especially vulnerable to events that make them doubt that they receive the appreciation they need (and think they deserve).
I also hypothesize that people with scientific careers are more vulnerable to "impostor syndrome" than others. Partly because they are constantly confronted with people who are smarter than themselves, but also because doubting everything is the essence of what they do /
That's also why well intentioned support from family and friends often doesn't help. If people around you tend to think of you as the smart girl/boy, they find it difficult to understand your self doubt. /
They cannot understand that when you're saying that you feel stupid or lack originality compared to others, it's not just a "mood thing", but it actually follows from your objective understanding of others' contributions. /
So, yeah, I guess one can be a professor in Princeton or Harvard, and be generally considered to be Nobel material, and still suffer from impostor syndrome. Or having exhausted one's capacity for self motivation. And there's another element that plays more in economics than in /
Egyptology or topology, I guess: even if economists have been blamed widely for an overly abstract approach to analysing society, I guess most of us have embarked in this career with the hope of being relevant. /
A big frustration for budding PhD economists (and, I suppose, a far from negligible cause for giving up) is precisely the feeling that their research is disconnected from what most people think are the big economic questions of our age /
But, if you work on empirical labour economics (like Alan Kruger) or climate economics (like Martin Weitzman), I guess it's mainly because you want your research to be meaningful and impactful. And, even if most economists know Keynes's quip that all practical men are slaves /
of a defunct economist, I suppose most of us would like practical men to listen to us before we become defunct. And, in the case of climate economics, the signs are not very encouraging. Which leads me to the only personal observation regarding Weitzman: /
When Weitzman gave his presentation on climate economics in Leuven a few months ago, a lot of people asked him the question what should be done. And the message was the one everyone involved in the field would give /
We have known for decades what should be done. We simply don't know how to convince the people that matter. My hypothesis is that it must be horribly depressing for one of the smartest people on earth to know that this is the best answer you can give. /
Well, that was actually the message I intended to convey when I started this thread. It got a bit out of hand, so to see.
