Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 11:24:09 -0500
From: Thomas Romer 

Sometime in 1963 I read Keynes's essay on Alfred Marshall. Although ostensibly it was about the great late-19th/early-20th century economist, it was really a love song about economics itself. At least, that's how it hit me: a field that combined social science, history, philosophy, PLUS mathematics. I decided I would become an economist, even though no-one I talked to at OHS knew anything about the subject. By the fall of 1963, I had discovered that MIT had the best economics department in the world. And, amazingly, David C.'s brother Peter was actually an MIT student (though, for some reason, not majoring in econ). Plus he was one of the coolest people you could ever meet. I applied to MIT and was lucky enough to be admitted (thanks, in large part, to the OHS training that helped in getting high SAT scores).

MIT was a place where you very quickly discovered who the really mathematically gifted students were; unlike quite a few of my dorm-mates, I was not one of them. But somehow I struggled through the first couple of years and gradually acclimated to the demands of the econ major. It was also a time when I developed my love of film and music. That wasn't hard in the Cambridge/Boston of the late sixties.

Graduate school at Yale seemed relatively easy after that. I found that I was interested in politics as well as economics. Several Yale faculty members were similarly inclined, and I was able to write my dissertation on some mathematical models of political economy, which used the tools of economic analysis to study the interaction of political and economic forces. While at Yale, I was also lucky to meet several terrific students at the Drama School and the Music School. They opened the doors to a world I would otherwise not know. And, most important, through another connection, I met the woman who would eventually become my wife. Katherine Benesch and I have been together for just about 50 years, married for 43 of them. She is a lawyer; most of her work has been related to health law in one way or another. She is also an ardent fan of the theater (her father was a gifted costume and set designer). 

I have been happily ensconced in academic institutions since nursery school. I have taught at U of Western Ontario, Carnegie-Mellon U., and (since 1991) at Princeton. At each of these places my students and colleagues have helped me learn how to bring mathematical analysis to bear on economic, social and political problems. These collaborations have been a great joy, and have also afforded opportunities (and excuses) for academic sojourns ranging from Stanford to Toulouse to Cape Town, and points between. The research that a relatively small group of us began around the early 70s has become a booming field. To the extent that there is a lesson here, it is this: Be sure to persuade people smarter than you to get involved.

Even as a grad student in New Haven, I would occasionally get to New York, especially to see films, and go to jazz clubs and galleries. When we moved to Princeton, those trips to NYC became more frequent, and we eventually acquired an apartment on the Upper West Side. Until the pandemic, we would divide our time between NJ and NYC, and now count an equal number of friends in both places. 

My Montreal ties have dwindled over the decades. Of my immediate family only my 92-year-old mother still lives there. She is at the Maimonides Geriatric Center. I have sisters in Calgary and Sydney Australia. On my occasional visits to Montreal, I sometimes wander around Outremont (we lived on Champagneur when I was at OHS), and try to see the past beneath the present.



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Thomas Romer;
Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Emeritus;
Fisher Hall;
Princeton University;