Yale's James Tobin on Encouraging Different University Divisions to Work Together to Build Up a Strong Economics Community

The Nobel Laureate James Tobin makes a number of wise points here about the challenge that Yale faced in the 1970s and 1980s for building up a cross-campus economics community.  These sound familiar.
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I felt that there were some problems related to the then new School of Management, and these may be continuing problems. One problem was, is, that SOM hires economists. The school should, of course, and there was a good prospect that SOM and the department could have useful joint appointments. We did have some, e.g., Paul McAvoy and Stephen Ross, but I have the feeling that in general joint appointments were not as successful as they could have been. Sidney Winter, who was primarily a department appointment, was also very suitable for an appointment at SOM and doing some teaching there. He wasn’t happy with his relationship with the school so we lost him a few years ago. I thought then and think now that there are some missed joint opportunities. The department would get a person who could add to the general intellectual climate of economics with only one-half a slot instead of a full slot. There are a number of areas that would make sense to be joint such as financial economics, industrial organization, regulation of business, any number of things like that that can be useful for collaboration in research and in teaching. But it doesn’t seem that we’ve been able to devise the ad hoc or systematic relationships to do that. It could also help to bring applied people into the department, which we need in several traditional areas of economics. We should have coverage in all the main areas. The school also has higher salaries for economists. The same economics Ph.D. would get more money being at the school than here. There’s just something about being a school of business instead of a department of economics. But I think we’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s a school up there, and they have bigger offices and plusher carpets and so on.