Background

Laura, welcome back to Berkeley.

Thank you very much.

How did your formative years prepare you for public service?

Somewhere between high school and college, and certainly in college, I decided I was interested in public policy. I want to emphasize that it never interested me to run for office. I never even ran for a school office. But it did interest me to try to figure out a way to address some national issues, like poverty or international trade. That was true from pretty early on.

And you were good at math.

Yes, I was good at math. But at a certain point I wanted to find a way to use math to link it to these public policy concerns, rather than math for its own sake.

In the accounts of your service in Washington (I'm going to flatter you now), you're described as "standing your ground in policy debates," "a great educator of politicians and the public," and "a person who doesn't take things personally." How are those skills honed?

Tyson in Washington, 10/93 You know, I had an ideal job for an academic in Washington. My job really was to give economic advice. I didn't run any programs and I wasn't after any office, so the only thing I had to offer was my advice. And I took that very seriously. I thought that when I went into a room, if I didn't say what I thought or what my profession thought about an issue, then I wasn't doing my job -- even if what I said was not politically easy for the listeners to accept.

So this gave you a focus?

It gave me a definition, a job definition and a focus. I said to myself many times, "If I don't give this advice then I'm not doing my job." I also said, "If I'm not credible, if I go out and speak publicly but I speak in a way which is not believable, then I will be of much less value to the administration." So that allowed me to hold my ground in terms of saying what I thought, rather than what someone told me to say.

Why did you go into economics?

Well, economics gets back to the math question. I was looking for a way to take my interest in mathematics, and my interest in analytical ways of thinking about the world, and apply them in a public policy arena. When I took an economics class in my sophomore year of college, I realized almost instantly that this was the right connection. It's a very analytical way of thinking. Logical. Scientific. You can use a fair amount of math in it if you want. But it was all about the kinds of issues that, in my private life, I worried a lot about, or read a lot about.

And you went to MIT.

Yes I did.

Whom did you study under at MIT?

Well, I studied under a great group of people, a professor named Evsey Domar who was an expert on the Soviet Union. I was very interested in comparative economics, how other societies handled the same economic problems as the United States. He became a great mentor and supporter of mine. I worked with a young faculty member, (very new to the field), named Duncan Foley, who is still in the field and was excellent. His wife was getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and he was very supportive of women in Ph.D. programs. And then some of the big names in the field -- I worked with Bob Solow and Lester Thurow.

And when did you get into political economy?

I think I was always in political economy. I always thought when I went to graduate school that I was going to study economics to apply to policy, political problems. In fact when I went to graduate school in economics I thought very, very seriously about going into public policy instead. I almost did, I almost went to get a public policy degree instead. And when I was at graduate school my intention really was to work for an organization like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. So my goal was always to use economics as a discipline to address certain policy challenges.

One of the skills that you developed is a capacity to communicate clearly, especially through writing, about what are often very dense and complicated issues. Where did you learn that skill?

Well I do believe that you can learn things by practice. I first learned how to be clear about economics through teaching. I think one thing that helped me, frankly, was that economics was not an easy discipline for me, it was a challenging discipline. It was something that I had to think about seriously and convince myself that I could follow the logic. So because of that, because sometimes it wasn't intuitive for me, I have been, I guess, quite likely when I sit down with someone to do it step by step because that's how I understand it. And I honed those skills by just teaching classes. Class after class. I started teaching in 1973, and I got better.

Now as far as writing is concerned, that also is something which comes with practice. It's not easy for me to write. Some people can sit down and just sort of polish something off. I tend to write so that the first version is very close to the last version. So I agonize over it, particularly over introductions, first paragraphs. But again I worked for a while, I served on the board of editors of the Los Angeles Times, nd therefore I was writing about every six weeks. And I just got better. I also, frankly, learned some pointers from my husband, who is a professional writer. When I started doing op-ed pieces for the LA Times he was very helpful to me in terms of thinking about structure and grabbing introductory sentences, things like that.

Do you have models in great economists who also were great writers?

Well I think there have been some very gifted writers among my profession. They do tend to be rare and they're very gifted, I would not compare myself to them. If you take John Maynard Keynes and you go back and read some of his work -- I just quoted something of his in an op-ed piece I'm working on about the Asian financial crisis and it's a beautiful quote. John Kenneth Galbraith is a modern version in the sense of being someone who really has the ability to write literature, who's also writing economics. I aspire, I think, to clarity.

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