----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]