Career Advice

Mankiw cites NY Times columnist David Brooks in Career Advice from David Brooks:

One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policy makers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense.

And, Mankiw on economists venturing out of their ivory tower:

I wonder how different the economics profession would be if economists were expected to do a year of service outside of academia or, at the very least, if university hiring committees rewarded a year of real-world experience as the equivalent of, say, a couple of academic publications. My conjecture is that the profession would be less creative but more useful.