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David is no doubt correct given the existing situation. The advice to 
students if they want to do what is currently being done and succeed at it 
need to be not only comfortable with doing math (as was the case when I was 
in graduate school) but committed to doing the math and speaking in that 
language.  On the other hand, very exciting things are going on in the 
economics profession among the best and the brightest.  Scholars like 
Andrei Shleifer and Avner Greif, let alone Levitt and his crowd, 
are transforming the cutting edge of research.  This hasn't translated yet 
to the educational track economists take, but it might.  I still hope that 
the economics profession can be changed in a direction that conceives of 
the discipline in a broader perspective. 
 
At GMU, we are developing tracks for PhD students --- experimental, public 
choice, etc.  It is our strategy to build on our strengths as we always 
have done.  We only have 28 or so faculty, so we cannot spread out like the 
major departments who have 40 or so faculty. We build in areas of our 
comparative advantage.  In doing that we focus on training the students 
with the tools necessary to be leading contributors in those areas.  
Experimentalist need to learn advanced game theory and statistics as well 
as lab design -- so they focus on that; public choice guys need to know 
econometrics, price theory and public finance and they focus on that.  I am 
developing the Philosophy, Politics and Economics track and that focuses on 
interdisciplinary work in political economy, methodology and history of 
thought. That requires another set of skills. 
 
In addition to my work in PPE (which is advancing the research program of 
Hayek and Buchanan), I also am the team leader for a project on economic 
development --- applied PPE in some sense. 
 
A little over a year ago I started a project with the Mercatus Center 
dealing with international economic development.  We sent teams of 
researchers into the field to study the barriers to entrepreneurship and 
the logic of interest group politics in these less developed economies. 
A web-documentary was made with the team in Romania and it is now available 
on line at -- 
http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/579.html  
 
 
A description of the evolution of this project and the thoughts behind it 
is available at: 
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke/new.html  
I am trying to get students interested in learning how to do field research 
using anthropological/sociological tools of empirical work and shift that 
through the rational choice lens of economics (as one might conceive of 
that project in the hands of Buchanan or Hayek). 
  
 
We will see how the projects works out over time.  The relevance for this 
discussion is just how one has to train individuals differently for 
different tasks.  Our focus is not on the model and measure exercise of 
standard economics, so our students that choose to be involved must instead 
focus on language training, take courses in sociology and anthropology and 
engage in research seminars with interdisciplinary audiences.   
 
If you are interested, please take a look. I think the web-documentary was 
very well done by the film crew and that Pete Leeson and Chris Coyne who 
are interviewed do an excellent job of explaining their project and the 
problems that Romania faces in attempting to transition to a "normal" 
economy. 
 
Comments/criticisms are of course welcome --- the papers from the forums 
project that we ran last year are also available on-line at: 
http://www.mercatus.org/socialchange/subcategory.php/64.html?menuid=2 
 
 
Peter J. Boettke 
George Mason University 
 
 
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