Doing Economics

Acknowledgments
It takes a village to raise a child, according to an alleged African proverb.
Similarly, it would have been impossible for me to write this book without
the support of several people, to whom I would like to express my gratitude.
Un grande ringraziamento to Sara Savastano, who provided the impetus
for this project.
I am grateful to Chris Barrett, whose influence on my life cannot be
overstated. Not only was Chris directly responsible for my meeting my
wife, but as my advisor at Cornell, he taught me a lot of the unwritten rules
of the economics profession. When I started working on the proposal for
this book, his comments on my draft proposal were invaluable.
I am equally grateful to Tim Beatty, thanks to whom I started co-teaching
our department’s second-year paper seminar as soon as I joined the
University of Minnesota in 2013. Though he dislikes the label because it
makes him feel old, Tim has been a wonderful mentor, with whom I have
had many fruitful conversations about the profession over the years, and
there is more than a little of those conversations in this book.
I did not know how to navigate the process of publishing a book, but
thanks to an early conversation with Kim Yi Dionne, I went in knowing
how to go about it and what to look out for. I also learned the true meaning
of haba na haba hujaza kibaba—little by little fills the measure, Kim’s
favorite Swahili proverb—by working on this book.
I have benefited from comments by Jeff Bloem, John Cranfield, Liz
Davis, Paul Glewwe, Eva-Marie Meemken, Jeff Reimer, and Joe Ritter,
who read early versions of chapter 2. Similarly, Jenn Cissé, Brady Horn,
Robbin Shoemaker, and Dawn Thilmany McFadden provided excellent
comments on chapter 5, while Mike Shor pointed me to the data on indirect
cost recovery rates I discuss in that chapter. My coauthor Seth Gitter sat
down for a conversation about advising undergraduates, which informed a
lot of the content of chapter 7. Teevrat Garg read through drafts of chapters
2, 3, and 4, and provided excellent insights about writing papers for and

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publishing in general science journals. Finally, I am grateful to Amy
Damon, Christine Moser, and Aine Seitz McCarthy, all of whom offered
their much-needed perspectives on finding funding (chapter 5) and advising
students (chapter 7). This latter chapter also benefited from Lindsey
Novak’s insights.
I wish to thank Emily Taber, my editor at MIT Press, for making the
process of writing my first book easy, and the two anonymous reviewers
she chose to review the proposal for this book as well as the first full draft
for their constructive comments and sharp insights about how to make the
book appealing to a broader audience. I am also very grateful to Chad
Zimmerman at a competing press, who came up with the title for this book,
and who graciously let me use it.
Finally, I am grateful to my wife Janet and my daughter Sophia, who put
up with my having to miss many daycare drop-offs and weekend activities
because I was working on this book. I love you both (and the dogs) more
than words can express.
Sub umbra alarum tuarum, יהוה

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