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If you had perfect research conditions and all the necessary data, what’s the biggest question you’d want to ask? Edward Prescott encourages his students to think beyond what’s possible and he’s followed his own advice too. His fundamental contributions to economics span many fields, such as economic growth theory, policy analysis, economic theory, econometrics, methodology and labor market research.

For Prescott, an interesting question has to "address some policy issue,” he says. “It needs to be something where current theory isn’t very good.” His rigorous yet straightforward thinking and research processes resulted in his paradigm-shifting work on the time inconsistency of economic policies and a methodological framework for understanding economic cycles. Close collaboration with his former graduate student and later colleague Finn Kydland won the two economists the Nobel Prize in 2004.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (shared), 2004

As co-author of papers written with both Kydland and Bob Lucas, another fellow laureate, that continue to define and shape economic research, Prescott never ceases to come up with thought-provoking, policy-relevant questions. "Whenever you delve into a problem, interesting questions pop up," says Prescott. "When you finally find the answers, it changes your thinking. You have better ways to address the complexities of reality. It’s amazing how useful our incredibly simple models are for drawing inferences and making predictions of what will happen if a certain policy or regime is followed."

What does commitment mean for society?

When it was published four decades ago, Prescott’s work marked a watershed moment for macroeconomic research. Since then he may have stepped into new terrains with new questions, but he never abandoned the old ones. He keeps connecting with ever-changing current events, particularly when discussing time-inconsistency with his undergraduate students. In his own way, Prescott creates continuity for understanding the fundamentals of economics and builds a history of policy making to pass on to the next generations. Change is an integral part of his work, rather than an impediment, and to progress.

Teaching the next generation of economists

If there’s a secret to Prescott’s method, then perhaps it’s his ability to always approach a problem from a fresh, novel angle. "I’m very good at forgetting," he jokes in his office overlooking the Arizona State University campus. "So I don’t get locked into old ways of thinking. I often reinvent wheels."

His technique to remaining open to ideas and solutions is to not make sure he never gets locked into circular thought patterns. "You’ve got to leave it be, come back to it later and when you forget your old way, you may find a new one that works," he says.

Prescott finds inspiration in conversations rather than in thought. After all, it’s people that make him enthusiastic about economics as a science. "Social sciences are different from natural sciences,” he says. “We have people. That makes things much more interesting in our models.”

The accumulation of Prescott’s inspiration and motivation from interactions with others creates a ripple effect that spreads among his students. He encourages and inspires both students and colleagues to build their own legacies in their own style. Commitment to the education of future generations is his way of addressing time-inconsistency in research.

While many of his students see him as an incredibly generous person both with his time and ideas, it’s precisely in the classroom he finds the fertile soil to nurture these ideas. One of his current research interests is understanding the complex issues surrounding public debt, which arose while explaining the tools for conducting inquiries to his undergraduates.

"We wondered in class how much government debt should exist,” he says. “It’s not zero, except in certain periods. In the 1950s, given the demographics, it was zero. Now we have a lot of old people, so we need a lot of government debt. It’s a lot more than the value of the stock market."

Prescott finds his ideas are often at odds with other scholars when it comes debt and deficit. "I look at the ratio to the GNP and whether that’s going up,” he says. “We need to figure out how much people will want to save for retirement. Compare the sum of this number with gross national income, then subtract from that the value of business equity, houses and factories and stocks. If debt starts going way above this number, I’d worry.”

How much public debt is too much?

In his research, Prescott has shown that people worry less about public debt. Rather, they want tax reforms and other systems that don’t seem to be working fairly. "Change is essential to progress," he says. "I get a little worried when I see systems set up that are wasteful. The US has a really high-quality medical care system and it’s better than people realize. But it’s excessively expensive. I wish we could set up a better system."

Why is change important for progress?

Leaving Prescott to prepare for an upcoming conference on gender equality in labor markets that he’s hosting at his university, we ask him for a piece of advice for young people.

He adds some personal proof to the pudding. "Everybody thought I’d fail miserably on the public speaking tour after I got the Nobel, and I thought I would too,” he says. “But I surprised myself. They asked me back."