RIP Robert Lucas. A wonderful teacher, the deepest of thinkers and un unbelievably clear, insightful writer.
He was always obsessed by ideas, always going deeper. An anecdote from my graduate school years tells a lot about his obsessive drive to learn and to understand.
Conversation
It was the 3rd year of our PhD. After two gruelling years (the Core, with less than 50% pass rate on Year 1, the Prelims, with another 50% of students gone in Year 2) we were having our first reception as "real" grad students outside in the Social Science Quadrangle of .
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Lucas approach me, asked me how I was doing.
I said after two brutal years, I was very happy. I was enjoying thinking about ideas, about which problem I would tackle for my dissertation, reading a lot and learning a lot, trying to figure out the next step.
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He was very disappointed, almost upset, by my answer:
"Ideas are hard. What you do not understand takes over your life. You puzzle over it, you cannot sleep until you solve it. This is not a game you enjoy. This is a challenge that obsesses you." He said.
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That was his intensity. He was always learning, always trying to figure out the next problem. And few people did as much to advance economics.
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My paper with and Claire Lelarge in the AER, and a lot of my research with Esteban Rossi-Hansberg on the knowledge economy, owes a debt to this pathbraking paper
My intellectual debt with Bob Lucas is huge.
jstor.org/stable/3003596
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He was kind to me when I was a 30-year-old visiting scholar from a lesser university, and not even a macroeconomist, and even accepted an invitation to a party at my apartment.
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El profesor Robert Lucas visitó la en el mes de octubre de 2010 para dictar una lección magistral. DEP
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Sorry. Do not know about him as a teacher. But his work is deeply flawed - as shown by, among many other things, the 2009 Great financial Crisis. It misled many.
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