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David, 
 
Have you updated your rankings on GMU since Vernon Smith and the ICES group has moved
here?  According to one paper published (not by GMU graduates or people connected to GMU
in any way), the department was ranked the most productive research department in the
south -- over UVA, Maryland and Duke -- _before_ Vernon and those guys moved to our campus
in 2001.  ICES brought with them 7 faculty members, including Kevin McCabe --- probably
the leader in the neuroeconomics movement -- see http://neuroeconomics.typepad.com/ and we
have also hired  in 2002 Laurence Iannaccone, the leading expert on the economics of
religion (a topic growing in importance) --
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/faculty_bios/liannaccone.html  We did lose Tollison from the years
that the ranking was based, but picking up the lab guys and Larry should more than
compensate for that, and in the public choice center we also hired Thomas Stratman (an
editor at the SEJ) -- who is on leave this year at Chicago.
 
I know there are always questions with these department rankings and there is also a
reputation of the school issue --- but a department with two Nobel Prize winners and a few
other very well known faculty (perhaps even infamous now after DARPA), and a department
known to support philosophical interests and history of ideas in economics might be
somewhere where a potential student with those interests might want to look.  Or at least
we need to make sure that people out there such as yourself keep the program on their
minds when thinking about the question that was raised.
 
In fact, I head up the Program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and on the programs
web-site I have a suggested course of study which includes not only courses in economics
and philosophy (taught by Tyler Cowen), but religions and economics (taught by Larry
Iannaccone) and history of thought (taught by David Levy).  There are other tracks of
study available at GMU, including public choice, law and economics (joint degree with the
law school, which is ranked in the top tier) and of course experimental
economics. 
 
Our placement of recent graduates has been good --- 1 of our students is currently working
with IRIS at the University of Maryland, and two of our students are establishing a new
center at San Jose State University.  One of our current students is spending this year as
a visiting fellow at Harvard, and 6 of our students this past summer got to spend 2 months
abroad conducting field research in countries such as the Romania and the Czech
Republic.  So we have an active and exciting research program with lots of opportunities
for graduate students who are slightly out of sync to pursue at GMU and I would recommend
prospective students to look at our various web
sites describing our department and the opportunities for funding that exist there. 
 
The character of the department at GMU is much different from what you (David Colander)
and Arjo experienced during your visits in the mid 1980s when you were researching The
Making of an Economist.  It has changed both for the good and the bad.  We are now in many
ways a more conventional
department than we were then.  Our Austrian program is far reduced from what it was then
(something I regret), and ironically we are not as strong in core theory as were then (but
that is because core theory is no longer as
important as it was then in the profession at large). But the students are better trained
now in terms of the conventional professional game of modeling and measuring.  Yet unlike
many places, we do really open up to a
variety of topics and approaches after the core training.  I would tell a prospective
student that GMU is the best weird place to study economics and I think the judgment that
Arjo left with in the mid-1980s that was reported
about our program would still be the same (see The Making of an Economist, p. 184).  BTW,
I was one of the students interviewed back then, left GMU for 10 years while I was at NYU
and Stanford, and then came back to GMU -- my
impressions of the place are therefore not of an outsider, but an insider -- though one
who spent time away so I can do a comparative insider analysis.
 
Pete 
 
The Program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics web site is:
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/mi/index.html -- the program descriptions is ongoing some revision,
but the list of activities we support and the suggested program of study is laid out
there.
 
For the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy in general just go to
http://www.gmu.edu/jbc
 
And for the Mercatus Center and the Social Change Project (in which we also draw on
Douglass North as a resource) see www.mercatus.org/socialchange
 
All the best, 
 
Peter J. Boettke 
George Mason University 
 
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