John Rust

Professor of Economics
Age: 59
Hometown: Wisconsin
Education: B.A. University of Pennsylvania, Mathematics; Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Economics; Honorary Masters, Yale University
Areas of research: Microeconomics; Recent paper on Bertrand price competition based on a collusion case in Australia between two cardboard producers, predicting what the prices would have been without collusion
Time at Georgetown: 2 years
Courses: “Mathematics for Economics,” “Econometrics”

How did you narrow your focus to what you’re studying today?
Very early in my life I read a lot of science fiction. I was really interested in Isaac Asimov. As a kid I read his Foundation trilogy. In the book, it’s about forecasting the end of the galactic empire. I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool. They can develop mathematical models to predict the future.” That always grabbed me, so I think that stuck with me and made me want to go to college and go into more mathematical, quantitative things.

What’s the greatest challenge in your field today?
Being relevant. I think economists have to think about how to be relevant to the world. A lot of our theories aren’t very good. There’s a lot of disagreement about the economy. You can read the newspaper and some people think we have too much debt and the Federal Reserve should be less expansionary, and other people think there’s too much unemployment and there’s so much disagreement and part of it is, nobody knows who’s right and who’s wrong. So there’s a lot of scientific uncertainty in economics.

I feel that in some sense economists collectively have been rather clueless, like in some sense in 2008 in the financial collapse. There’s so much complexity in the economy that we don’t even really know what’s going on. I think more of a real-world focus on some of the things we do, a lot of us kind of have our heads in the clouds, we’re just thinking about mathematical models, but it’s not that connected with reality, and I think connecting with reality is extremely important.

Is that something you emphasize in your classes?
I think it’s very important to show students, if you’re going to teach them a lot of math, why the math is relevant and how it actually helps you think about the world. So these recent books, like “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis and so on, showing people that actually, these things are relevant, that learning the math and modeling things actually helps people make better decisions. So I think that’s really cool when you can make the connection between the math and making better decisions.

What’s something you wish more students would take away from your classes?
The appreciation that hard work pays off and that learning economics — that these are tools that can really make a difference in your life. I’m certainly glad that I got my Ph.D. and that I learned the math and got the tools and computer skills, and I’d like to give the students a sense that this is really worth learning and these are going to be valuable skills for your future. 

Interview by Emma Hinchliffe