The Development of Labor Economics

In this week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott, I introduce you to the one and only, Dan Hamermesh. Dan is professor emeritus now at the University of Texas where he spent the last part of his career. He’s part of the story of Princeton that I’ve been interested in telling, as he was there from 1969 to 1973 before heading to Michigan State where he was until 1993. He then went down the street from me to Austin at University of Texas until 2014.

Dan did his undergraduate in economics from the University of Chicago where he got to see some of the big labor economists of that era up close, like H. Gregg Lewis, who was also Gary Becker’s adviser. It was really interesting to hear Dan’s impressions of Lewis; for the first time, I wondered if all of the ethos and worldview we associate with Becker (“thinking like an economist” where economics was “everywhere”) might in fact be attributable to Lewis, even though Lewis was in many ways a traditional labor economist, and you could say Becker was a bit more nontraditional since he took economics in an imperialistic fashion into areas like the family and discrimination, among others. Dan provides some interesting perspective.

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Dan has been a premier labor economist his entire life, and is an important part of the story of labor and empirical micro of the last quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century. An unusually productive economist who blended well the price theory of Chicago with contemporary empiricism that we closely associate with labor economics in general. A very funny and energetic man, he is also one of those you tend to say “they’ve forgotten more economics than I’ll ever know”. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Dan, but I always do. So please welcome MC Hammer himself, Dan Hamermesh.

Opening music credits: Wes Cunningham