Underdogs

Given my general love for underdogs and my affinity for libertarian economists, it shouldn't surprise any of you that I'm pleased with George Mason's run in the NCAA tourney (though I've yet to watch a single game). Here's a nice piece from Slate about how GMU built its basketball and economics programs (they have 2, should be 3, Nobel winners on the faculty) the same way: they took the Moneyball approach!

GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. Its basketball team and academic programs began with the (correct) assumption that they couldn't hope to compete against the top schools in their fields—say, Harvard Law School or the Duke Blue Devils—by directly imitating their methods.

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This is also the idea behind GMU's free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn't afford to be a first-class MIT and didn't want to be a second-class MIT.

James Buchanan [from Murfreesboro, TN], GMU's first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist [should already have won], has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.

As with Moneyball, however, those opportunities disappear once everyone starts looking for them. I think that's true for the GMU economics department, but I really don't think coaches have learned their lessons yet. What's the guy's name (is it Romer?) at one of the California schools has shown, pretty convincingly, that NFL teams should "go for it" WAY more often on 4th down, yet no one will listen. You know the one coach that did seek him out and talk to him about his research? Bill Belichick -- a man who led his team to 3 Super Bowl titles in the free era agency. [BTW, Wikipedia claims Belichick has an econ degree, which wouldn't surprise me, but I thought I'd heard that was a myth.]

Of course I realize most everyone else is way more excited by the GMU basketball program, but I enjoyed seeing the econ folks getting their "props".

Oh, I know I haven't commented on the whole French employment contract thing -- the jokes are just too obvious and too easy -- but I couldn't resist this little bit I saw in this WaPo story:

Similarly, the students on the streets today espouse economic views entirely unpolluted by reality. If the CPE [the proposed employment contract] is enacted, said one young woman, "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."

Huh; how 'bout that?