As Professor Gray and Professor Stone prepare for retirement, they share some of their insights and best memories of their distinguished careers in the Department of Economics with their long-time colleague, Stephen Haynes.

“Economist” tends not to appear on many people’s lists of top-ten dream jobs.  What led you to this career path?

Jo Anna—Admission to the graduate program in economics at the University of Chicago and a National Science Foundation Fellowship looked a whole lot better than the job market for women in the early 1970s.

Joe—I was an undergraduate at U. Texas, El Paso, which is next to the Rio Grande border with Mexico. From my dorm, I could see across the river to one of the poorest areas of Ciudad Juarez. Families lived in crude adobe huts with no running water or electricity. Women washed clothes on the river bank, and men made adobe bricks to lie out in the sun to dry and then sold them for a few pennies a day. I wondered why a people on one side of the river who spoke the same language and had much the same culture as most of the people on the other side of the river were so much poorer. Economics impressed me as having some of the best answers to that question.

Why did you decide to join the UO?

Jo Anna—I fell in love with Oregon when my parents moved here in the mid-1970s. When the University of Oregon contacted me about a job, I jumped.

Joe—I wanted to teach and do research at a university, and the UO is a very good university in a beautiful state.

Each of you has enjoyed a rich career as research/teaching faculty as well as university administrators. What would you single out as your most memorable experience at the UO?

Jo Anna—Having the contents of my desk subpoenaed during the time I served as department head.

Joe—That’s an easy one! While giving my first lecture in PLC 180 with over 300 students, I looked up to see two dogs in the far back of the room pursuing a romantic rendezvous. Only I could see them, so I just kept lecturing.

How has the UO changed since you arrived?

Jo Anna—I won’t comment on the university as a whole, but I can speak to our department. It was a fine department when I arrived here. But it is better now. Walk down the hallways of the fourth or fifth floors of PLC today and you will see better facilities, a larger and better organized staff, and gifted, hardworking young faculty members who are more than capable of exceeding the accomplishments of their predecessors.

Joe—For students, their numbers are larger, and they pay much, much more. For faculty, the campus is both larger and more complex in its operation and sources of funding.

How has the Economics profession itself changed over the years?

Jo Anna—My side of the profession (macroeconomics) is more technically demanding than when I entered it, and someone with my limited formal training in mathematics and statistics would not be admitted to our department’s graduate program today. On the other hand, some things don’t change. Macroeconomists still tend to be an ideological lot.

Joe—The most fundamental elements of economics remain the same: scarcity, opportunity cost, optimizing behavior, decisions at the margin, and diminishing returns, but there are at least two major differences in the profession. Behavioral and neuro economics, and game theory, all play a much more prominent role.

The recent chaos in DC has received considerable attention in the press. What is your take on this?

Joe—I don’t see economic chaos, I see predictable political chaos. Politicians have incentives to avoid tough, costly decisions.  Both we and they know that Congress and the President must do something to avoid actual default, but in the meantime they play a game of chicken and blame the other guy.

Jo Anna—I agree with Joe that what we are seeing at the moment is political chaos. The repercussions for the economy are still largely ahead of us. I’m encouraged by the prospect of Janet Yellen as the new Federal Reserve Board Chair. She strikes me as long on intellect and expertise and refreshingly short on ego.

Joe, you served on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan. What was most memorable about that experience?

Joe—It was my first cabinet-level meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House when I was the economist who had done the analysis for the major agenda item—whether to impose import quotas on steel. Cabinet officials sat round the table; I and other senior staff sat in chairs behind the official we were advising. At the far end of the room from the entrance, Theodore Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace prize medallion sat on the mantle, near the well-known portrait of him riding a horse. I wondered how did a guy from a tiny town in Texas get into this room, and I sure hoped I got all the numbers right!

Joe, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about your nine years as Dean of CAS?

Joe – Intellectually, the most exciting challenge for me was trying to move the incentives and organization of the college away from the usual patronage system, where every need at the department level is expected to be met with additional resources from the dean, to a more decentralized method of identifying and funding important priorities. I was amazed at how well the simple economic notions of incentives and decentralization worked. On a more personal level, my strongest memories are of all the talented, dedicated people who worked together to succeed in reaching important goals.

Setting aside “The Pick” by Kenny Wheaton, what is your most memorable UO football memory? 

Joe—That’s probably the fourth-down screen pass for a touchdown from Bill Musgrave to tight end Vince Ferry that clinched a last-minute, come-from-behind, victory over UCLA—the first win over UCLA since Autzen was built in 1967. Students took the goal posts down, carried them out of Autzen, and across the river all the way to the steps of Johnson Hall.

Jo Anna, your dissertation committee at the University of Chicago was comprised of Robert Barro (dissertation chair) and the Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. Do any memories stand out from that experience?

Jo Anna – Those would have to be (a) Barro actually laughing as he looked at the first piece of work I brought to his office, and (b) Friedman kindly explaining to me the error in my thinking during my first visit to his office, sending me off with instructions to “go home little girl and think about it” (well, that’s what I heard, even if it’s not exactly what he said). Overall, Chicago was a pretty rough place in those days. But I went home, thought about it, and wrote a paper defending my position. Friedman graciously conceded the point and the paper became the first chapter of my dissertation as well as the most highly cited piece of work I have ever written. Barro was a wonderful dissertation chair, though he never really stopped laughing at me, and I don’t think Lucas ever knew what to make of me.

The fact that you served on the Board of Governors of the FED, with colleagues such as Ken Rogoff and Robert Flood is also quite remarkable. What was that experience like, Jo Anna?

Jo Anna—Well, there was also Richard Meese, with whom I carpooled at times. He would roll down the car window and bark at the bikers on the 14^th Street Bridge. On a more serious note, the FED at that time was an incredibly rich, very special environment. Dale Henderson assembled and mentored our group, which also included Matt Canzoneri. These people taught me how to do research and write papers.

Jo Anna, have you ever figured out why Joe and so many others, myself included, derive so much enjoyment out of watching football?

Jo Anna—No. And I can’t tell you why the stock market went up yesterday, either.