Econ 101, Hey! George Mason’s Hoops Team and Econ Department Have Common Traits
On Tuesday, Peter Boettke and Alexander Tabarrok made some interesting analogies between the school’s Final Four-Qualifying basketball teams and it multiple Nobel Prize-winning Economics Department, which I of course saved for today before the Patriots’ game with Florida:
MU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. Its basketball team and academic programs began with the (correct) assumption that they couldn’t hope to compete against the top schools in their fields—say, Harvard Law School or the Duke Blue Devils—by directly imitating their methods. GMU lacks the resources and reputation to recruit McDonald’s All-Americans or Alan Dershowitzes. So instead, GMU has hunted for inefficiencies in its markets. Coach Jim Larranaga follows the Moneyball model of recruitment: hunting for the undervalued players—the ones who everyone else thought were too short, too thin, or too fat—and then building them into a team. In its astonishing defeat of UConn, GMU’s players were giving away 4 inches at nearly every position.
….. This is also the idea behind GMU’s free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn’t afford to be a first-class MIT and didn’t want to be a second-class MIT, so successive chairs of the department, backed by entrepreneurial university presidents George Johnson and Alan Merten, looked for unexploited opportunities.
James Buchanan, GMU’s first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist, has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.
In the academic market, herd behavior is compounded by political correctness. In the 1960s, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock were joined at the University of Virginia by Ronald Coase (who would later win his own Nobel). But the university administration and powerful organizations like the Ford Foundation thought their free-market ideas (limited government, tax cuts, selling radio spectrum!) were disreputable, and they worked hard to push them out of the university.
From the 1960s into the 1980s, a small university such as GMU could hire conservative and free-market thinkers of true genius for the same kinds of reasons that, in the mid-1960s, a middling school like Texas Western University could recruit some of the best basketball players in the nation, so long as they were black, and win the 1966 NCAA championship. Conservative and free-market economists were so undervalued that GMU could afford the best of them.
Pretty cool comparison. Go Patriots.
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Previous Posts:
March 20 — (on making Sweet 16) Econ 101, Hey! Econ 101, Hey! Econ, Econ, Econ 101!
March 27 — Econ 101, Hey! George Mason in the Final Four
