14 Questions with a Course 14 Professor 📈📉 by Fiona L. '27

How did you become interested in Course 14? Do you have any words for students who may be considering it?

I have so many juniors or seniors who take 14.01, and they’re like, “Oh my God, why didn’t I take this sooner?” Economics is great. And I feel like what hasn’t changed about MIT is there’s a feeling that economics is not a tough enough major, that you have to major in Course 6⁠02 The "EECS" department, which currently straddles the major fields of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. or “something that’s harder,” or if you’re majoring in Course 14, you also have to double major in something else. That’s not true. 14 is a great major. We’re an especially great major because we have very few undergrads compared to our incredible faculty. We have multiple Nobel Prize winners on our faculty, and very few undergrads to talk to them. So it’s an incredible opportunity.

I came here to MIT as someone who was good at math but didn’t like math. Like, I wasn’t a guy who got excited about proofs, but I was pretty good at doing math in my head. So I thought I’d be a math major, but it turned out I didn’t love the math classes because I didn’t really want to prove things. But then I took economics, and was like, “oh my god, I can use math to do interesting things.” And so that was why taking 14.01 really changed my life.

What do you think are some really cool and interesting jobs that people can do with a Course 14 degree that they may not know about?

That’s a great question. With Course 14, you could do anything. So first of all, it’s a great pre-law major, many people successfully go to law school or even med school. So you can go to a wide range of grad schools, and another popular thing is econ grad school or policy graduate school. So a lot of grad school options, job wise.

The way I describe this to my students, I say, “think about how much you like economics.” On one end, you just love economics. You love research. You want to eat and breathe it. Go get a PhD in economics. On another end, you’re like, “it was a fine thing to major in, but I’m not that into it.” You can then get a job in the finance sector. It’s economics adjacent, so your skills will help, yes, but you won’t really be doing similar things as in economics classes. Or you could go work for a government agency that does economic policy or a think tank.

You could also become an economic consultant for all sorts of economic consultancy firms. Let me clear, there’s two types of economic consulting. The kind of economic consulting people have heard of is where you go to a firm like Bain and help them decide what to do. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a huge sector of jobs which basically support experts in their work, either experts who are testifying in cases, or experts working for government agencies. And that’s a really cool way to support PhDs. It’s also a way to see whether you love economics before you decide if you want to go to grad school.

When you were an undergraduate at MIT, what dorm did you live in, and what activities were you involved in?

I lived in Baker, I was in the tennis team and yearbook. I was in yearbook my freshman year, tennis team freshman and sophomore year. And then I got very involved in CUP (Committee for Undergraduate Performance). CUP was set up when I was a junior as a place to consider academic innovations. I was the first student to sit on that committee as a student representative. So I got more involved in running MIT stuff.

I also had three UROPs⁠03 UROP stands for Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, a very long-lived program that provides accessible research opportunities to MIT undergrads. . They were terrific. They were very helpful to me to really see that I might like economics research as well, not just economics as a topic.

What were your UROPs in, and do you feel like they informed the research you did as
an adult?

They didn’t. So the first one was basically helping out a grad student. I don’t remember it very well. The second one was for an economic historian writing a book on the breakup of the telephone monopoly in the US. I was doing research on that. And the third one was for a famous international economist on exchange rate regimes.

And actually, because of that third one, I went to grad school thinking, “I want to do international economics.” But when I got there, I realized I wasn’t that interested in that. I actually went to domestic economics.

How did you get involved in healthcare economics, then?

I was always interested in domestic US policy stuff. And when I was in grad school, people were really excited about thinking about healthcare, and I realized this is a great area for someone who’s interested in US domestic policy. So I got into it.

What was your experience in policy work, such as your work on Obamacare?

For me, the work was like 14.01. Whereas in class we optimized everything economically, now there’s a new constraint to optimize, which is to actually make it work politically. And to me, it just makes it a more interesting problem. Frustrating at times, but more interesting. And so I realized that the way I could have the biggest influence on health care policy was through what I was good at, which was numbers. When they want to create policy, politicians want to understand what it’s going to do, what it’s going to cost, and how it’s going to affect people. And I made myself someone that could provide those numbers to them: I provided the computer model that could calculate them. As a result, I became sort of useful to the process, and that’s how I got involved.

I also worked on Romneycare here in Massachusetts, which became the basis for Obamacare, and I probably had more influence on that than I did in Obamacare. So that was really the first big thing.

The other thing I think students might be interested in is that I wrote a book with Simon Johnson, a Nobel Prize winner at the Sloan School⁠04 MIT's business school . It was called Jumpstarting America. In that book, we proposed a strategy to set up new technology hubs around the country. And that actually got adopted by the Biden administration. They actually wrote it into law in the CHIPS and Science Act. They had a $10 billion program that was based on our book, so that was really rewarding as well.

I think that my goal in life, and the goal of many economists is: “I want to use the tools of economics to make the world a better place.” And every day I try to think about how can I use the tools of economics to make the world a better place. Some days, that’s doing basic economics research to develop new findings that can be used to make the world a better place. Sometimes it’s actually making policy, but basically it’s all in the same service.

How does policy work compare to research, and how do both of them compare to teaching?

I mean, I think it’s almost like policy work is research plus teaching. Research is really about discovery, teaching is about communication and policy work is about translating discovery through communication. Let’s say that’s how they sort of fit together.

Do you have any unique or strong beliefs about education that inform how you teach your classes?

I think my main belief is that it’s not up to me to decide how you understand something. My job is to figure out how you understand something and to teach it to you in a way that you understand it. I think a lot of teachers are like: “This is how I understand it, I’m gonna teach it to you this way and then I’m done. If you don’t understand it, tough luck for you.” I think I try to teach a certain way, but like I say in class, I teach the graphs, the math, the intuition, and if people ask questions, I try to explain a different way. My job is to meet people where they are and help them understand it in a way that works for them, not just that works for me.

Wanting to “use economics to make the world a better place,” does teaching fall into that?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, like I said, every semester I’ll have students in 14.01 come to me to say “I’m going to do a major in economics because of 14.01.” I originally didn’t love teaching 14.01. I also teach 14.41, Econ in Public Policy, which is an elective for economics majors. And I love that class; I wrote the textbook for the class; I love it.

When I was first asked to teach 14.01, I wasn’t that thrilled about it—but now I love teaching it.

And what I love is, I feel like with 14.41 I get all students who are interested, but with 14.01, I change students’ minds. With 14.41, students are like, “it’s a great class,” but I’m not changing anyone’s mind. Anyone in that class sort of already made up their mind. With 14.01, we have kids like I was at MIT, saying “wow, this might be a good thing, I want to learn more.”

There’s a set of introductory classes like 14.01 that are not professors’ first choice to teach, but that people have to teach anyways. The “service classes,” if you will. Then people teach them, end up liking them a lot and putting a lot of work in. But nobody comes to MIT saying, “I want to teach basic economics.” We are all doing more advanced things. However, people do it and end up enjoying it, and it becomes an important part of who they are.

Which were your favorite and least favorite 14.01 concepts?

My favorite concept is externalities. Least favorite is cost functions. They’re so boring.

Could you give a brief overview of what externalities and cost functions are?

Externalities are basically situations where one economic actor’s actions affect another economic actor, but they don’t bear the consequences themself. So if I smoke and make you sick, that’s an externality. If you’re in here right now and it’s 50 years ago, when we could smoke in the office, and I smoked and made you sick, that’s an externality, because I am engaging in activity that’s making you worse off, but it’s at no [immediate/short-term] cost to me.

For cost functions, we think of a firm as a unit of production. They have a mathematical function that determines how they produce and essentially, to decide how firms behave, we have to translate that function into something called a supply curve, and that involves getting from A to B and involves a lot of, sort of, not fun math.

How would you describe your music taste, and how do you get your concert recommendations that you share with us at the start of each class?

My music taste is fast and loud, and my concert recommendations are that there are two websites. One is called Crossroads, and one is called Bowery. Those two websites list all the shows that are coming to all the venues in Boston. And if you subscribe to them, you get an email every week from each of them.

Last question, what is one fact that you’d be happy to have students know about you?

This year, I will go to 66 concerts.