Monday, May 15, 2023

Bob Lucas

I just got the sad news that Bob Lucas has passed away. He was truly a giant among economists, and a wonderful warm person. 

I will only pass on three remembrances that others will not likely mention. 

Bob was incredibly welcoming to me, a young brash and fairly untutored young economist from Berkeley.  

In the fall of 1985 I gave what was no doubt the most disastrous first seminar by a new assistant professor in the Department's history. It was something about random walks and real business cycles, and was going nowhere. Bob stopped by my office, and expressed doubt about this random walk stuff. He said, if you look at longer and longer horizons, GNP volatility goes down. At least I had the wit to recognize what had just been handed to me on a silver platter, dropped everything and wrote the "Random walk in GNP," my first big paper. Without that, I doubt I would be where I am today. Thank you Bob.  He and Nancy were kind to us socially as well. 

The first Lucas paper that I recall reading, while I was still at Berkeley, was his review of a report to the OECD.  I don't think anyone else writing about Bob will mention this masterpiece. If you get annoyed by policy blather, read this article. Reading it as a grad student, I loved the way he sliced through loose prose like warm butter. No BS with Bob. Only clear thinking please. I mentioned it later, and he laughed saying he wrote it in a bad mood because he was getting divorced. Like "After Keynesian Macroeconomics," Bob could wield a pen. 

Much later,  I attended a revelatory money workshop. Bob presented an early version of, I think, "Ideas and growth."  In the model, people have ideas, and bump into each other randomly and share ideas. Questioner after questioner complained that there wasn't any economics in the model. Why not put in some incentive for people to bump in to each other, or something non mechanical. Time after time, Bob answered each suggestion that he had tried it, but it didn't make much difference to the outcome, so he stripped it out of the model. Clearly, he had been playing with this model over a year, working to eliminate  needless ingredients, not to add more generality. It's great to see the production function at work. 

Bob is known as a theorist, but he had a great handle on empirical work as well. His Carnegie Rochester money demand paper basically reinvented cointegration, and saw clearly what dozens of others missed. "Mechanics of economic development" starts by putting together facts. "International evidence on inflation-output tradeoffs" 1973 makes one stunning graph. And more. 

There is so much to say about Bob the great economist, superb colleague and tremendous human being, but I will stop here for now. RIP Bob. And thank you. 

Update:

Ben Moll has a lovely twitter thread about Bob as a thesis adviser. Bob covered Ben's thesis draft with useful comments. Bob read my early papers and did the same thing. This encouraged a culture of comments. Though a young assistant professor, I took it as a duty to write comments on Bob's papers! And some of them actually helped. This was the culture of the economics department in the 1980s, not common. Bob helped quite a few people and JPE authors to see what their papers were really about, making dramatic improvements.  

The outpouring on twitter is remarkable. More remarkable, here is a man for whom we could celebrate every single paper as pathbreaking. Yet the outpouring is all about his wonderful personal qualities. 

A correspondent reminds me of one last story. Bob's divorce agreement specified half of his Nobel prize, which he paid. Asked  by a reporter if he had regrets, he answered "A deal's a deal." 

Next post, focused on intellectual contributions. 

22 comments:

  1. I remember his class in the first year macro sequence, he was a good teacher which is surprisingly rare among great economists (cough, Gary Becker, cough).

    You were a good teacher though:)

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  2. Jesus Fernandez-VillaverdeMay 15, 2023 at 2:08 PM

    Such a sad day for economics. Let me share an anecdote about Lucas.

    I was a second year grad student working at the Minneapolis Fed as an RA. Bob used to visit for a semester for many years. I bump into him while walking in the hallway. He offers his hand and says: "Hi, I am Bob," with utmost humbleness and warmth.

    Of course, I knew he was Lucas! I thought: "This is like being a third-rate soccer player, meeting Pelé by chance and he saying, "Hi, I am Pelé," without even a hint of superiority over you."

    Obviously, everyone will talk about Bob because of his academic accomplishments. His papers are for the ages. I would gladly give up my left hand for having written one of them. But the way he treated a poor, clueless second-year grad student he randomly met at the Minneapolis Fed was such a fundamental point in my career that I have, to this day, try to imitate it to the best of my ability.

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    1. Great anecdote. Much appreciated.

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    2. I took your summer lecture in Nanjing many years ago as a master student. I didn't understand much of the material given my poor training. But I could not imagine a prof from Penn was so nice and took questions from clueless students very seriously .

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    3. He is probably refering to Jesus (I think he is at Penn).

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    4. @John Cochrane - the anon above is presumably directing his comment to Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, who is at Penn.

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    5. But Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde (who was being replied to) is a prof from Penn (and presumably taught a lecture in Nanjing)...

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    6. I believe he was responding to Jesus Fernandez-Villarverde of UPenn.

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    7. But Jesus is from Penn, no?

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    8. "Hi, I am Jesus" might sound different...

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  3. Bob's reviews and essays are definitely underappreciated masterpieces. He has an excellent and, I suspect, not often read review of Skidelsky's biography of Keynes. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2124768 (sorry, I couldn't find a non-paywalled link)

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    1. I guess we should all go and read his little stuff-- it might even benefit us more than rereading the big stuff, and it's probably easier reading. His 2018 vitae is at https://home.uchicago.edu/~relucas/relucas_cv_2018.pdf.

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  4. Very sad news.

    I can offer a little color/background on the bumping into people idea. In 1981 Bob taught an undergraduate course in economic growth to get up to speed on the literature in preparation for what would become his seminal research on the topic. I was one of the fortunate few that took the course. One of the books in the reading list was Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The lesson from the book that Bob imparted was exactly that cities allowed more interactions and thus more sharing of ideas, with synergistic effects that spurred growth

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  5. You may not know this, but he specifically mentioned you as a great communicator of economics (along with being an excellent economist). Pretty sure he mentioned this blog specifically as doing important work that needed to be done.

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    1. You just made my day! Thanks.

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  6. Met him twice at Iowa and was captivated by his presence… we debated Chicago Bulls and Scottie Pippen and then later at a Summer Econometrics Meeting he introduced to Kjetil Storesletten and Amir Yaron while effusively praising Yaron and Orazio Attanasio. Very generous and a terrific guy. Rest in Peace, Bob Lucas. We are in mourning but share your enthusiastic positivity. Amlan Roy

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  7. Thank you for your post. He was one of the economists whose legacy goes far beyond economics. He gave us tools to think public policies. As a financial economist working for the Financial Markets Commission of Chile, I am reminded of his Lucas Critique.

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  8. I was just a lowly graduate student, but he was very kind and encouraging to me. He was also generous with his time when he visited Iowa. And his macro class was wonderful. I remember more from it than just about any other class I took.

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  9. Prof. Lucas was clearly an "Einstein" or "Newton" of economics in the sense that he pretty much singlehandedly launched a whole new way of thinking about economics that opened up new pathways for the science to make progress. Like many others, I am not 100% in agreement that the construct has been a success and it may have inadvertently poured too much cold water on other approaches that weren't viewed as being as "rigorous" but it is impossible not to be in awe of the man's singular achievements.

    My favorite (perhaps apocryphal) Lucas anecdote is that he was once at a faculty mixer at Chicago and the chair of the English department berated him for 20 minutes about the "absurd" amount of money he earned relative to English professors and that it was "criminal". Prof Lucas apparently looked cooly into the person's eyes and said - the U of Chicago does not determine how much money I earn, it only determines whether I earn it here." Such a great economics lesson for an English major!!!!

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  10. I found the letter Bob wrote me when I got my Ph.D. offer letter from Chicago, 25 years ago. It was such a warm letter.
    He said, "Let me tell you a bit about our program. Our first year has a very strong sequence in macroeconomics". Then he introduced sequences of courses in Capital Theory, Money and Banking, and time series taught by Lars Hansen, Nancy Stokey, Rob Townsend, Casey Mulligan, Fernando Alvarez and others. He summarized, “In short, Chicago is (emphasized) the research frontier in this field, just as it was when Wesley Mitchell studied here at the turn of the century, when Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were students in the 1930s, and when Neil Wallace, David Laidler, and I were students together in the 1960s. (I can list students from the 1990s, too, but they aren't on your reading lists yet!)"
    I am fortunate and thankful to take this road laid by Bob, with the guidance from Lars, you and many others in Chicago.

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  11. I'll never forget him coming out of a classroom and raising his voice at my TA and me to lower ours, while we were working through an honors game theory (Sonnenschein) problem set in the hallway of Rosenwald -- he was giving a lecture in a nearby classroom, doors open! I didn't know who he was, and my TA said "you just got told by a Nobel prize winner". We had a good laugh.

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  12. And also his compassion. When my mother had her second recurrence and I left to care for her, Bob wrote me a note saying, I needed to stop work and care for her. We can begin work again. After a difficult period after her death, he said to me, you need to go to work! And he arranged a teaching job for me. And gradually I was able to recover from my loss. He took care of me in this terrible time of my life.

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