Thread by @JohnFPfaff

An essential post on the toxic culture that permeates economics.

My first year of grad school remains the single most emotionally destructive and exhausting year I've experienced... even worse than the one where one of my newborn twins had 5+ critical surgeries.

https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1288279714247913472

And I am a straight white guy. So I had every single advantage, and it still was emotionally abusive in a way that still sticks with me, over 20 years later.

I'd say I can't imagine what it was like for the Black students in my entering cohort, but... yeah. There weren't any.

But I do remember one overarching act of cruelty, which reflects how little the department valued grad student lives.

One classmate of mine was an older guy. Already had a PhD in Philosophy. Wrote some paper on econ, sent it to a prof at Chicago. They liked it, but....

They told him it had real potential, but if he wanted to go down that path, he really needed to get a formal training in economics. So they invited him to be a grad student.

Seems flattering, yeah?

So he uproots his family (wife, youngish kids), quits his job, comes to Chicago.

Now, his PhD was in Philosophy, not economics. He had no math training.

The math in grad school starts at calculus, quickly ramps up from there.

He didn't know calculus. Much less linear algebra. Much less differential equations.

He is, bluntly, screwed.

As most of us struggled to keep up with... everything and anything... he was doing all that, AND trying to teach himself math, AND trying to be a husband and father.

He was in the library as much as the rest of us were. But most of us were 21 year olds without families.*

* There were a few other married students in our class, and as far as I know most of them are still married to the same ppl. But it must have been hard, bc they spent more time with me than with their spouses. Because It Was Expected of Us.

But I digress.

No point in dragging this out. He fails his first-year exams, thru no real fault of his own.

And at Chicago, that's not all that unusual. They liked to fail about 1/3 of those taking the first year exams, make them retake the entire year again.

But you only get one more shot.

Needless to say, he fails the second time around too. The math demands were just too great to overcome in two years... while being in grad school as well... while being a father and a husband.

So he gets invited to program he wasn't ready for, then kicked out after two years.

I don't recall ever seeing him get any real assistance from the department. There was, AFAICT, no effort to work something out for him, take into account any of the exceptional circumstances.

He uprooted his life, and his family's lives, but in the end... what?

Even at the time, it struck me as profoundly unfair and wrong. Writing this now, it just seems overwhelmingly so.

The department could have done so much more for him, could have truly HELPED him, worked with him, nurtured whatever they saw that led to that invitation.

But instead... nothing. Basically because he hadn't known how to take a derivative before arriving?

I'm sorry, E. You deserved so much more than that.