I have to convince an audience, regardless of what “discipline” is listening. (…) I don’t care what it is.
Claudia Goldin, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics for SUMA
Guillermo Astudillo:
Dear Professor Goldin, I want to express my gratitude for this special space, on this special day, in your very busy agenda. For people reading to this without context, Professor Claudia Goldin is a Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She was recently awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics and was named Woman of the Year by Time magazine.
My name is Guillermo Astudillo. I’m a Harvard student from Colombia. I am the founding leader of SUMA, a Harvard student-led initiative for interdisciplinarity. The purpose of this conversation is to discuss the role of interdisciplinarity in Professor Goldin work.
So my first question is about your research. Many speeches and ceremonies of the Nobel Prize have consistently highlighted the uniqueness of your research in bridging economics and history to understand labor economics. In general, how important is interdisciplinarity for the purpose of your research?
Claudia Goldin:
Thank you, Guillermo. I’m an economic historian and I bridge two; I bridge economics, and I bridge history,
I think that part of it is that I took the issues of labor economics, the issues that we economists find important, and I asked, what would we discover as we went back in time? And so we know, for example, that women’s adult, married women, white women’s labor force participation rates, as we measure them, are relatively low. In fact, incredibly low even at the beginning of the 20th century. And yet, at the end of the 20th century, these rates are, you know, for many countries in the 80s, some in the 70s, some much lower than that, but they’re much, much greater than they had been. So when I say countries, I mean countries that are richer, more developed countries.
Guillermo Astudillo:
What is your view of independent disciplines?
Claudia Goldin:
So my view of what I do and what academics should do is research and write but just researching and just writing isn’t enough. I have to convince; I have to convince an audience, regardless of what discipline is listening. The audience can be economists, the audience can be historians, the audience can be my parents, the audience can be people who know about economics or who don’t. They can be very smart people; they can be people who don’t read very often. But if they’re interested in reading what I write, I have to convince them. There are no trees that fall in the forest that aren’t heard in the work that I do. So that’s the point. It has nothing to do with, quote, a “discipline”. It has to do with what I must do to convince my audience of what I’m saying. And so that may be speaking to them in a language that you might think of as having the discipline of sociology or demography or of physics or of economics or of history. I don’t care what it is.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Put simply, you are centering a phenomenon, rather than disciplines. Putting the attention on the phenomenon, rather than focusing on expressing solutions for that problem or it’s understanding through the lenses of a specific discipline.
Claudia Goldin:
Yes, I would say that. I would say more the understanding than the solutions. I’m generally not big on solutions.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Powerful. The Nobel Prize Committee have expressed multiple times what they considered to be your biggest findings. But in your own words, what would you say are the most important takeaways from your research?
Claudia Goldin:
Right. So I was extremely fortunate in many different ways. And one was that not only did I receive the Nobel Prize, but I received it for a very large field, a fairly large amount of my work. Many people when they receive the Nobel Prize will receive it for a very small part of their work. And once you were told, the moment that you received that letter that tells you yes indeed you did get a Nobel Prize, is that what you say in your talk, for example, you deliver has to be just relevant to what they what the committee awarded you the Nobel Prize for.
On the one hand, I was given an immense gift, not just in the prize but in the statement of the committee. The committee and I could go through in detail why the committee was just absolutely excellent about this. But what it meant was that I could sort of step back from a large amount of work that I had done from the 1970s until the day I won the award, when a piece of mine came out called Why Women Won.
And I could talk about the large part of history. But let me tell you something else: Not only have I done work in that field and the Nobel Committee of course knows this, but I also have done a large amount of work on the history of economic inequality, the role of education, and the role of technology. That’s another large part of my work. I’ve written a book on the history of American slavery in cities and in industry. I am known for producing the cause of the in the workforce, the history of the female labor force, the history of the gender gap, the history of educated and less educated women in the labor force. That’s an important part of my work, an important part of history, but it’s not the full amount of it.
Guillermo Astudillo:
If we were to simmer down what you are deeply interested in, could you name it? or you’re interested in multiple different things?
Claudia Goldin:
Sure, so I’m consistently interested in long-term change. The fact that the female labor force for white married adult women in 1900 is measured to be around 5, and then by the turn of this century it’s around 75. For college women, it’s well over 80. How did we get there? Is this really an increase of that much? Is it points, or are we mismeasuring what happened early on? And if it has increased by a lot, why did it increase?
And if it did increase by a lot, what was the impact on individuals? And if it increased so much, why is it the case that men and women in the workforce still do very different things and earn very different amounts? That’s the broad set of issues.
Guillermo Astudillo:
By this, it’s clear you have a stable and consistent interest behind your diverse work. People might get an eclectic picture from the outside, maybe only pinning down economics, technology, education, etc. But it is evident that there’s a simple interest, and you have engaged all these disciplines and methodologies to clarify and, as you said, to convince an audience of your findings.
Claudia Goldin:
Right. And yet at the same time, I am at my core an economist. There are markets in my work. There are equilibria in my work. So it’s not as if we can jump into this history and say, well, wages are this and supply changes and nothing happens. We have to ask if there are changes in the market; we should expect there to be changes in other aspects of the market. So coming at it as an economist, it disciplines what we say by what the market essentially disciplines the issues. That emerges as an important issue.
Guillermo Astudillo:
You have defined the limits of academics to clarify and convince. But do you believe that academics’ convincing can have the expectation of influence? for example, markets or corporate policies or nations policies?
Claudia Goldin:
Do I think I can rule them? Janet Yellen can move the market; I don’t move the market.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Do you ever think about the implementation of your findings on local or national policy? Can your work be possible applied to solving the problem or limited to understanding the problem?
Claudia Goldin:
I think it can; it can be applied to solving many different problems. Let’s take, for example, why do women earn less than men? So if we believe that the answer is that there’s, when I say believe, if we think that the answer is that the majority of these differences come from the fact that supervisors and managers are biased. Then the answer might be, well, give them anti-bias training. But that isn’t what the answer is. If we think, if we can show, as I can show, that the answer is that by and large, in different-sex couples that have family responsibilities like children, women step back and take jobs that are more family-friendly; they earn less.
And so, to the extent that some jobs are very greedy and pay a lot more if you put in more time, then a different-sex couple is going to allocate jobs in the household, some type of specialization, so that one member of the couple is essentially has a job but is on call at home and the other one has a similar type of job but is on call at the… Well. That person is going to be able to take the greedier job and earn a tremendous amount more. So if that’s the reason, then spending all this money on anti-bias training isn’t going to do anything except make the companies that give anti-bias training a lot more money.
Guillermo Astudillo:
A lesson on effectiveness. And those sounds like big implications of your findings.
Claudia Goldin:
You know, if it’s the case that labor force participation in India and Pakistan is low because of traditions and norms that constrain individuals, constrain women to stay at home for various reasons, then that might motivate us in various ways to devise policies if we wanted to increase their labor force participation. The same thing goes for issues concerning fertility in Korea and Japan that are very worried about low birth rates: how to increase the birth rate? Well, it’s pretty simple. If you say to women, work and have kids, and no one’s going to help you at home, they’re going to say, well, I guess I won’t have the kids. So change has to come in ways that are different from what we usually think of.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Your research uncovers the inherent complexity of your phenomena of interests. I’m very curious about your outlook on technology. Is this something that you still working on?
Claudia Goldin:
I’m always interested in every single thing, but I do not speak ex cathedra about anything. If I don’t know enough about a subject, I won’t speak about it. And I don’t think we know enough. Everyone wants to talk about what’s going to happen next, but unless we truly understand it, we’re just throwing out vague notions about what might happen next, and I don’t have a good enough set of notions. So yes, of course, I’m interested in technology, but who isn’t interested in it.
Guillermo Astudillo:
To a reader interested in following your steps. How can they complement your work? How would that research look like? more complex? more disciplines involved? more specialized?
Claudia Goldin:
I think the answer is that what I have done is hard, and it’s not necessarily the road to success for young people today who are trying to get tenure at major universities. And that’s just the way things are.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Wrapping up, for people reading. Let’s turn this into an invitation. Students interested in research should look to stablish themselves in their fields, while drawing from multiple disciplinary angles to delve understand a phenomenon or a problem of their interest?
Claudia Goldin:
I would hope so.
Guillermo Astudillo:
Thank you very much for this conversation professor Goldin.
