Several years ago in these pages, I lamented the boring image that economists project in the popular culture, an image that could use a boost from a movie role showing an economist doing interesting, challenging and worthwhile work ("Economist as Movie Hero?" The Teaching Economist, Issue 12, Fall 1996). After all, the brilliant scientist has been a movie staple since silent films. If you told me years ago that one day there would be a successful movie about a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, I would have exclaimed, "Oh happy day!"

Well, as you probably know, the movie based on Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. has become a critical and box-office success, surpassing $100 million in early February. With Russell Crowe as Nash, A Beautiful Mind has won four Golden Globe Awards and has been nominated for eight Academy Awards including best picture, actor, supporting actor, director, and screenplay.

Unfortunately, Nash is not an economist but a mathematician, so the public image of economists gets no lift from the movie. In fact, most viewers will think that Nash's Nobel is in mathematics, not economics, since the movie never mentions that the award is in economics (there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but you wouldn't know that from the movie). To the extent economists get mentioned, they are characterized as waiting around for this mathematician to straighten out Adam Smith.

Besides economists, other victims of the movie include teachers, class instruction, and textbooks. In fact, you might say that the very idea of a formal education is at odds with what the movie is about. The trappings of education are mere foils for a story about a lone, brooding genius. His solitary mind is beautiful without any value added from teachers, classes, books, or tests. As Russell Crowe's Nash declares in the movie, "I cannot waste time with these classes, these books, memorizing the weaker assumptions of lesser mortals. I need to look through, to the governing dynamics, to find a truly original idea. It is the only way I will distinguish myself."

When compared with Nasar's detailed biography (A Beautiful Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1998), the movie devalues the role that education played in shaping Nash's beautiful mind. My interest is not in Nash's mental illness, which according to the biography began years after the events to be discussed here took place. Let's compare the movie with the biography on some key points. Note that, in the process of elaborating on these key points, I will not give away the movie's dramatic twists.

Nash's Educational Background

The Movie: In the opening scene, Nash arrives at Princeton's graduate program as some hayseed fresh from the hills of West Virginia, lacking the educational pedigree of his classmates. "You the poor kid that never got to go to Exeter of Andover?" a classmate inquires. He is mistaken for a waiter at the graduate student reception. The movie is telling us that Nash made it to Princeton, not because of his educational background, but because of his innate ability. There is no evidence throughout the movie that any teacher ever helped shape that mind. Certainly no faculty member at Princeton plays a role.

The Biography: Nash's family was well educated, and by the time he reached Princeton, his own education probably eclipsed that of other graduate students. His maternal grandparents were college graduates as were their four children, including Nash's mother, who studied languages at West Virginia University. Before marrying, she taught high school for six years and attended summer programs at Columbia, Berkeley, and the University of Virginia. "A natural teacher" (p. 31), she taught her son to read by age four, tutored him up through high school, and arranged for him to take courses at a nearby college while he was still in high school.

Nash's paternal grandparents were also college graduates. His paternal grandmother had been first a student, then a teacher at Nash College in Texas, before marrying the son of its founders. After marriage, these two ran the college. Their son, John's father, earned an engineering degree from Texas A&M, where he taught briefly after graduation. He had "a sharp, inquiring mind" (p. 26) and patiently answered his son's many questions about the world.

How many of you had parents and grandparents who were all college graduates or had parents so actively involved in your education? Among the cohort of Nash's parents' generation, fewer than 1 in 20 graduated from college; fewer than 1 in 35 made it in his grandparents' generation.

Nash won a Westinghouse scholarship to Carnegie Tech, where scholarship students took most of their classes together-small classes taught by select instructors. The math faculty was distinguished and included European émigrés who had worked with Einstein. These scholars so impressed Princeton's Albert Tucker (of Kuhn-Tucker fame) when he visited that he said he felt like he was "bringing coals to Newcastle" (p. 42). Nash ended up taking enough advanced graduate courses at Carnegie Tech to earn an M.S. in math as a bonus along with his B.S.

Nash's Class Attendance

The Movie: "You ever going to go to class?" a classmate inquires. Nash says it will blunt his creativity. The department head reminds Nash that other graduate students go to class. Nash, again, is the iconoclast and solitary genius, alone with his thoughts and his muse.

The Biography: Upon entering the mathematics program at Princeton, graduate students were advised that they could attend class or not-their call. They were also told that course grades meant nothing (p. 59). The department had no course requirements and no course examinations. All that mattered were the general exams initially offered in the spring of the first year. Students could prepare for them however they chose. So Nash's no-class approach was well within the framework of his graduate program and was not the defiant act of a lone genius. He did try one course in algebraic topology but decided the subject was too formal for him, so he stopped attending class (p. 68). Based on his excellent training at Carnegie Tech, he likely already had learned much of what Princeton had to offer. But graduate students in math had one formal requirement. They had to go to tea each afternoon, where students and faculty talked shop.

The faculty had enough doubts about Nash's preparation that they persuaded him not to sit for the generals that first spring (p. 74). He spent the summer cramming and passed them in the fall of his second year (p. 93). The movie makes no mention of the generals (and compresses the Ph.D. program into a single academic year). Once Nash passed the general exams, he returned to his singular focus of finding a breakthrough idea for his dissertation. He may not have attended class, but he apparently did go to tea regularly, where he was a major griller of graduate students and faculty, pumping them about what was hot and where the holes were. Through these conversations and by attending lectures from visiting mathematicians, he identified important math problems of the day (p. 68). But the movie ignores all this, never showing Nash asking a faculty member a single question at Princeton. That would violate the genius-acting-alone movie arc.

Nash and Books

The Movie: Nash is never shown reading a book at Princeton. The only time we see him with a book, he ostensibly drops the course textbook in the trash at the beginning of a course he is teaching at MIT.

The Biography: Books apparently were a part of his education, at least prior to graduate school. While other children played, young Nash "could always be found in the parlor with his nose buried in a book or magazine" (p. 31). In his short autobiography (www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html), Nash notes that as a child he learned from the many books available at his and his grandparents' homes. His father kept him supplied with science books.
But, according to one Princeton classmate, Nash was dyslexic (p. 68). If true, this could explain why he spent so little time reading at Princeton.

Nash's Dissertation

The Movie: Nash's inspiration for his famous equilibrium comes from an incident at a student bar, where some colleagues are discussing the odds of picking up women. He rushes back to his room, spends weeks feverishly writing up his findings, and presents the finished draft to his advisor, who remarks, "You do realize that this flies in the face of one hundred and fifty years of economic theory?" Based on "a breakthrough of this magnitude," his advisor says he can get any job he wants, including the top prize, the MIT position.

The Biography: In his autobiography, Nash says he got the idea for his famous equilibrium from taking an International Economics course at Carnegie Tech (a class he apparently attended). Albert Tucker, his dissertation advisor at Princeton, was not the rubber stamp we see in the movie. After Tucker asked for revisions on a draft, Nash fell silent for months. He considered changing topics and advisors. But Tucker "could be surprisingly forceful" and eventually convinced him to stick with the topic and make the necessary changes (p. 96).

Nash did get an MIT job, but a position there was decidedly inferior to the jobs at Princeton or Harvard to which he aspired. One reason he did not get an offer from Princeton was that the professor who supervised the honors calculus course Nash taught there complained that Nash could neither teach nor get along with students (p. 132).

Nash may be a brilliant mathematician but his teaching was abysmal, as the biography documents chapter and verse. Even the movie acknowledges the problem. In his only teaching scene in the movie, after dropping the textbook in the trash, he announces to his MIT class: "Personally, I think this class will be a deadly waste of both your, and what's infinitely worse, my time. But there you are. Attend or not. Complete the assignments at your whim." He then puts a mathematical puzzle on the board, saying, "This problem will take some of you a few months to solve, some of you the rest of your natural lives." Nasar, the biographer, writes that according to one colleague, Nash advised other instructors, "If you're at MIT, forget about teaching. Just do research" (p. 139). Sound familiar?

Return to Contents of Issue 22, Spring 2002

The last issue of The Teaching Economist discussed problems of sleep-deprived students. PBS's Frontline series just weighed in with "Inside the Teenage Brain" Researchers conclude that teens need nine hours of sleep a night, but most get nowhere near that. To promote better sleep habits, researchers say students need to reset their body clocks by adopting a routine bedtime throughout the week (say 10 p.m), avoiding binge sleeping on weekends, and getting lots of daylight in the morning (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/from/).

The last issue of The Teaching Economist also talked about economic pundits who have little real background in the discipline. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton and now candidate for governor of Massachusetts, has been called to task by The Boston Globe for promising to fix the state's "faltering" economy even though he has no graduate training in economics (he has a law degree). The story questions whether he is up to the task. (See D.C. Denison, "Lack of Formal Training in the Field Doesn't Deter Drive to Fix State's Finances,"
The Boston Globe, 01/20/02.)

But card-carrying economists are still ubiquitous, including, for the first time in history, the presidents of both Harvard and Yale. Larry Summers, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, was appointed Harvard's president last summer. He earned a Harvard Ph.D. in economics in 1982. Richard C. Levin was appointed Yale's president in 1993 after chairing its economics department and heading the graduate school. He earned a Yale Ph.D. in economics in 1974. Other economists serve as college and university presidents around the country, including University of Connecticut's Philip Austin, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from Michigan State. Economists have a long tradition in the top spot. Francis A. Walker, the first and longest serving president of the American Economic Association (1886 to 1892) and after whom the Walker prize is named, was president of MIT from 1881 to 1897, when he died in office.

A good example of the role of self-interest occurs when students who had been zombies to that point in the course, come to life once a couple of exam points are on the line. To argue their case, they use the imagination of Stephen King, the legal skills of Johnny Cochran, and the persistence of a pit bull. For better or worse, much of our personal contact with students during the term revolves around exams.

As a sign of the times, Dilbert, the title character by cartoonist Scott Adams, lost his job temporarily in January, the first cartoon casualty of the recession. Adams majored in economics at Hartwick College in New York.

"Only when the tide goes out, do you find out who's been swimming without a bathing suit."
     -William Seidman, former head of the Resolution Trust Corporation,
       commenting on CNBC about how a recession uncovers bad bank loans.

"I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms."
     -Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist,
       defending the $50,000 he received from serving on an Enron board that
       was mostly for show.

"Wealth can be concealed, but not poverty."
     -Finnish proverb

"Sleep is the poor man's treasure."
     -Latvian proverb

"An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it."
     -Anonymous

Return to Contents of Issue 22, Spring 2002

To explore how student views of cheating differ across countries, Jan R. Magnus of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and three colleagues surveyed about 900 students in four countries--Russia, Netherlands, United States, and Israel. They posed the following hypothetical: "Student C reports to the departmental office that student A, while taking an exam, copied answers from student B's paper with the consent of student B." Student attitudes differed greatly across countries. Russian students hated student C's actions, quoting the Russian proverb, "First whip to the informer." Students in Israel and the Netherlands also disliked informers, though not as much as the Russians did. In the United States, cheating was condemned as unfair to other students, so U.S. students were more tolerant of informers. Except in Russia, high school students were less tolerant of informers than were undergraduates, who were less tolerant than graduate students. And everywhere except Russia, the higher the level of education, the less tolerant students were of student A, the primary cheater. Students at the same educational level in different countries had different attitudes toward A, B, and C. Students within a particular country had the same attitude toward A and B, but opposite views of A and C. The study, entitled "Tolerance of Cheating: An Analysis Across Countries," will appear in the Winter 2002 issue of the Journal of Economic Education (www.indiana.edu/~econed/). How do economics instructors deal with cheating? I surveyed course syllabi on the Web and found that many instructors simply refer students to college or university guidelines, codes of conduct, or other official documents. For example, Zhen Zhu of the University of Oklahoma states, "All acts of academic misconduct will be reported and adjudicated as prescribed by the Academic Misconduct Code." Some instructors are vague about the consequences, such as Ed Birdyshaw of the University of Oregon: "If a student is caught cheating, I will take the proper steps that are available to me in such situations."

When penalties are explicit, the minimum is failure on the exam or the paper (in the case of plagiarism). For example, Elynor Davis at Georgia Southern notes: "A plagiarized paper will receive a grade of 'F.' " And Charles C. Fisher of Pittsburg State in Kansas states: "Cheating and/or plagiarism will result in a score of zero for the particular assignment(s) involved (e.g., exam, quiz, home project)…Anyone helping another person cheat will also receive a score of zero for the item in question."

A more stringent penalty is failure in the course, as with Jennie Wenger of University of North Texas: "The minimal punishment for cheating will be 'F' in the course. Further action will be taken if deemed appropriate by the Chair of the Department." John Miller of Mercer University states, "Any student found guilty of cheating will automatically be awarded a grade of F in this course." Paul W. Grimes of Mississippi State is more direct: "First Offense: 'F' in the course." And Ann Merchant Ducharme of the University of Chicago adds a twist: "Students caught cheating will receive an "F" in the course, and will have the incident reported to their college advisor."

The strongest sanction is expulsion. Dan Black of the University of Kentucky warns in economic language: "The Department of Economics has a policy to make cheating very costly so that any benefits from cheating will be less than the expected cost of cheating. Thus, it is not optimal for you to cheat. If apprehended, cheaters will receive the maximum penalty; this may involve expulsion from the University." John-Charles Bradbury of George Mason University has the strongest language: "This is very important: If you cheat I will catch you, fail you, and publicly humiliate you....I will do everything in my power to see to it that you are expelled."

Finally, some instructors leave open a range of possible penalties. For example, Art O'Sullivan of Lewis and Clark College notes: "Plagiarism and cheating are serious offenses and may be punished by (i) assigning a failing grade on the exam, paper, or project, (ii) assigning a failing grade for the course, or (iii) expulsion from the university."

Return to Contents of Issue 22, Spring 2002

In 1978 Kenneth Elzinga of the University of Virginia and William Breit of Trinity University in San Antonio published Murder at the Margin, a mystery about an economist-sleuth who solved crimes using economic reasoning. Writing under the joint pseudonym of Marshall Jevons, the two continued along these same lines with The Fatal Equilibrium in 1985 and A Deadly Indifference in 1995, essentially inventing this new genre.

Russell Roberts of Washington University now follows with The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance (MIT Press, 2001), a novel that examines capitalism largely through the dialogue between two teachers at a Washington, D.C. prep school. Sam Gordon teaches economics and places a high value on economic freedom; he finds most government regulations useless or worse. Laura Silver teaches English and hasn't thought that much about economics, but she doesn't like big business. Laura's limited understanding of economics allows Sam to explain issues to her (and to the reader) during their many discussions. Sam's ignorance of literature allows Laura to fill in those blanks, though with less frequency. To add some suspense, Sam is under threat of dismissal from the school, but we know not why.

Across town, Erica Baldwin heads a government watchdog agency trying to pin down Charles Krauss, a "ruthless CEO." Book chapters alternate between the Gordon-Silver romance and the Baldwin-Krauss confrontation. One challenge for the reader is to figure how these separate narratives relate.

According to the dust jacket, Milton Friedman found the novel "A page-turning well-written love story that also teaches an impressive amount of good economics." I agree with Friedman about the economics. In fact, a subtitle for the novel could be Free to Choose: The Novel. But I think the "page-turning" characterization is a stretch. I found the parallel narratives with alternating chapters distracting. You just start getting interested in the Sam-and-Laura story, when the book pulls you back to the business saga, which never did get off the ground for me. I can't say more about the book's split personality without giving away a central conceit.

Following Sam and Laura's "romance" was like watching snow melt-"Her kiss was softer than he could ever have imagined" (p. 174). The real "romance" is not between Sam and Laura but between Sam and capitalism. That's where the author's passion comes through. I like the fact that Sam talks the talk and walks the walk with regard to capitalism, even though he realizes his words and actions will often be misunderstood. Sam says, "Capitalism involves struggle, but it has an invisible heart beating at its core that transforms people's lives" (p. 170). So capitalism works not only with an invisible hand but with an invisible heart.

I think Roberts is onto something in wanting to pack more emotional punch into economic discourse. He also provides readers something not usually found in a novel-"Sources for Further Reading."

 Return to Contents of Issue 22,Spring 2002