Mark Kuperberg has been a professor of economics at Swarthmore College since 1977, becoming one of the college’s most seasoned faculty members. Besides being a graph-loving economist, he is also a newfound novel enthusiast, a 1,000-lap swimmer, and a wanderlust.
In 2019, he participated in the TedXSwarthmore event discussing the case for big government as well as other issues. We sat down in his Kohlberg office to discuss his experience with Swarthmore, swimming, and everything in between.
Annie Liu: Could you give us a brief introduction of yourself?
Mark Kuperberg: I’m an economics professor. I’ve been here for 47 years. It’s possible among current faculty, I’ve taught the most Swarthmore students of any member. I went to Amherst College, then I went to [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for graduate school, then I came here, and that’s pretty much it. I’ve had one job my whole life. Well, I had some summer jobs before when I was in college, but since I came here, I’ve had one job my whole life.
AL: What initially drew you to study economics?
MK: I wasn’t even an economics major in college. I was a political science major, because when I went to college as a freshperson like yourself, I thought I was going to go to law school, so I just extrapolated and said, “Well, what’s the obvious major for that? Political science.” But we had distribution requirements, just like you do, and I decided to take econ for my social science distribution requirement. It turns out I became really interested in it.
When I became a senior — I took the LSATs and GREs — and I was deciding what I should be applying for, I came to the conclusion that I was more interested in going to graduate school in economics than law school. Because I’m basically a coward, I realized that if I became a lawyer, I would just work for some big corporate law firm. I was from New York City and I wasn’t going to hang out my own shingle. In Manhattan, that’s not going to get you any clients. One of my best friends in college was from Portland, ME, and he went to law school. After law school, he did start his own private practice, but Portland is a small town and people kind of knew him, but New York is different so I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to do that.
So I thought, what am I really interested in? I’m interested in economics. Why am I interested in economics? The answer is I feel — without insulting any of the other subjects in the social sciences — that as a first round take on society and why things are the way they are, economics is the most parsimonious. It gives you the most information with the least effort.
AL: Now that we’ve talked about where your interest stemmed from, could you share if you have any current projects going on or certain areas of interest that excite you?
MK: I’m working with Professor Ayse Kaya in the political science department on two related papers. The first paper asks, “If you have a strong social safety net, are your citizens less anti-trade and less pro-tariffs?” And, paper number two asks, “If you have a strong safety net, are your citizens more anti-immigration?”
So it’s a little ironic, because people tend to think that being pro-trade and pro-immigrant go together, and to some degree they may. We’re looking at the data, so we’re not presuming anything, but our hypothesis is that if you have a strong safety net, then people in that kind of a country (or state in the United States) will be less willing to share it with immigrants. So a strong safety net can have diverse effects on globalization. It can make you more pro-trade because you don’t worry so much about losing your job because you have unemployment benefits. However, it could make you more anti-immigrant because you don’t want to pay taxes to support immigrants. So those are the two papers.
AL: Are there any trends in economics you think young researchers should pay attention to?
MK: When we talk about researchers, or more specifically young researchers, there are two aspects. One is, how important is the research? But the other is, can you actually do the research? They don’t always go together, and a lot of times they don’t go together. So if you’re a young person in graduate school worrying about your PhD thesis, what I’m about to say matters a lot: You’d better find a project that you can actually do even if it doesn’t revolutionize the field.
So with respect to the most important topic for me, it still is what I started with when I was in graduate school and what got me into macroeconomics, which is, “Why do we have recessions?” This may shock people, but we really do not have a good explanation for why there are recessions. You might think that with economics, having been around for a long time, and recessions being a super important concern, we might know the answer to this question, but we really don’t. And so to me, that’s the central question, but there’s no clear way to answer it.
AL: Regarding current events, what do you think about the economic policies of presidential candidates Harris and Trump?
MK: My opinion is that it’s not really worth your time thinking about it. Because when people run for president, they’re required to run as if they’re running for dictator, because they’re running like “I’m going to do X, I’m going to do Y, I’m going to do Z.” But the fact of the matter is, we don’t have a dictatorship, and courtesy of James Madison, we have three branches of government. In the current political environment, it’s virtually impossible to get anything through the Congress, and that’s going to be true no matter what happens in November. So you could have a wonderful plan, and it’s not going to happen. So really worrying about the details of their plans is almost not worth your time. You’re better off voting based on their broad philosophy.
AL: I know you said that you’ve been here at Swarthmore for 47 years. Could you share more about your journey here or why you chose this place?
MK: Because they gave me a job! So when you get out of graduate school, you apply for jobs, and only certain schools would offer me a job with this being one of them. Pomona [College] was also one of them, and I decided to come here versus Pomona. So, it wasn’t like I had no choices. But, you know, it wasn’t like Harvard [University] offered me a job. I don’t know what I would have done then.
AL: Was teaching always one of your more ideal career paths?
MK: So that’s why I was perfectly happy that liberal arts colleges were interested in me. I mean, I wasn’t like, “Oh geez, I’ll go do something else, maybe I’ll work for the Federal Reserve, because I couldn’t get a job at Harvard.” I never felt that way at all. I was very happy to have a teaching position because teaching was what kept me in graduate school. There was a time in graduate school I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue, and I spoke to a dean there saying that I was thinking of dropping out. The guy said, “Well, why don’t you try teaching first before you make that final decision?” I did, and I loved it. So to me, being at a place where teaching mattered and people cared about that, and you get positive reinforcement for that, unlike a major research university, was a big plus.
AL: Since teaching is what you love, are there any memorable moments in your career that you would like to share?
MK: Not to in any way discount all the students I’ve taught, which are in the thousands, but I have some favorite students that I still remember. I’ve been to two student weddings, and I cherish when students come back for whatever reason and say “Hi” and tell me what they’re up to. I really cherish that. So another little factoid: I was probably one of the least well-dressed faculty members when I came here, and now I’m one of the best-dressed faculty members. I haven’t changed my dress at all.
So on Oct. 25 — Friday — there’s a Diverse Careers in Economics panel, and I’m the person who organized the panel. There’s five Swarthmore grads who were econ majors and I taught all these people. It’s “Diverse Careers,” and I took that very seriously, so we have a farmer, a doctor, an AI person, a financial person, and a lawyer.
AL: What do you hope students take away from your class, both academically and personally?
MK: So there’s two sorts of things that go on in class. There’s the material, or the substance of what we are actually learning. Then there are the skills that you’re learning to apply to the material. I do feel that in modern education, there’s too much emphasis on transmitting information. Good teaching is almost defined as, “Did you make it easy for the students to get the information?’ To me, that’s a totally wrong view of what education is. What I want people to do is to learn how to, in essence, think like an economist. Not because they’re going to become economists, but because sometime in their life, that way of thinking might help them. So for me, the material is like the medium, but it’s not the message. The material is the thing you use to deliver the message, but the message is thinking like an economist.
In macroeconomics it is slightly different, it’s learning to think through models, because there’s very little microeconomics in macroeconomics — at least when I teach it — and so you’re really not using the core economic concepts like opportunity cost and trade offs. You’re just learning how to think through models. So, that’s what I would hope people would take away — this ability to think, as opposed to remembering a line on page 23 of a textbook.
AL: Now I know you say jokingly in class that “you don’t have a life,” but what are some things that interest you outside of the classroom?
MK: The first round answer is, I don’t have a life. The second round answer is, I really don’t have a life. All right, well wait …I was an elected political official for sixteen years, so I guess that counts. I was on the local town council for four years and the school board for twelve years. I had a very contentious election in the very last election that I ran in, which I won, and that took a lot of work.
So I now read novels, which I never really used to do. It used to be the case where I would read one novel a summer, and then in winter, nothing — not literature at least. But now I mostly, except when I’m grading, read for an hour before I go to bed and I really enjoy that.
And then I swim. I’ve always swum. In fact, once we end here, I’m gonna go swimming. So in the summer, college is closed, but there’s a local swim club. See what my shirt says? It says “2019, 1000 laps.” I probably have 40 shirts like this with different colors and different years, but always 1,000 laps. It’s a bit of grade inflation, because what they call laps are really lengths. So if you consider a lap a round trip in a pool, then it’s just really 500 laps. But we don’t call it that.
We take vacations. Every summer me and my family go on vacation and we visit national parks and stuff. I’ve been all over Canada, because it’s a lot cooler in Canada in the summer, and it was before all these fires. The fires are a whole other issue. Global warming is a big problem, by the way. It’s in my TEDx talk, I just want to be clear on that.
AL: Just to wrap things up, what advice would you give to Swarthmore students in general?
MK: Students are going to hate what I’m about to say. You know, you have four years here now. A lot of you are going to go on to graduate school, so you’re not done with schooling, generally (I guess that may be the bad news). But this is four years where you have an opportunity to learn stuff that maybe has no practical significance. And that may seem like a waste of time, but really it’s the only time in your life where you’re going to have that. Once you’re out into the world, you’re going to be busy doing stuff, not studying stuff. You may study stuff for your job, but you’re not going to be studying this wide range of stuff. So this is really your only opportunity to think and to be intellectual. Even when you become a professional academic, you’re very specialized, and it’s not the same thing. So I would say, you really should concentrate on your courses.
But I think some people will go “No, no, no, no, it’s too boring, and I’m not changing the world.” But by the time you graduate, the average life expectancy will probably be 90 years old or so. You’ll have another 69 years to change the world, but you only have four years to develop your views about the world. So that’s what you should do here.