Interview with the 2023 economic sciences laureate Claudia Goldin on 6 December 2023 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

When did you know you wanted to pursue economic sciences?

Claudia Goldin: I always knew that I wanted to be a scientist, but I didn’t know what economics was. I didn’t know what economics was until I got to college. There are many fields that you don’t know until you get to college. It’s hard to teach philosophy or religion or economics to high school students. We do a very good job teaching complicated sciences, but we don’t do a very good job teaching complicated subjects that concern interactions of societies and people and politics, and that’s what you learn when you’re in college. When I was a child, I knew I wanted to do something in science. I didn’t know a lot about science, but when I got to Bronx High School of Science, I discovered the wonders of what goes on under a microscope, and I decided that I wanted to study bacteria. When I went to college, I went to college to do bacteriology, but I didn’t, I wasn’t even informed sufficiently about what was happening in genetics and in the science of the cell. I don’t think I got the best information from people at the time, but it didn’t matter really in the long run.

How did you decide to study the women’s labour market?

Claudia Goldin: When I went to Cornell, I entered to do bacteriology, and then I transferred to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to pursue just about anything that I wanted to pursue. I took courses in many, many different subjects. Then when I hit upon economics, it wasn’t simply economics, it was a person, it was Alfred Kahn, who was someone who was passionate about the field of economics and explained it to me in a way that I could understand and truly appreciate as being a subject in which there were a multiplicity of forces that also brought you eventually back to an equilibrium. It was a subject that was highly mathematical that appealed to me. His field happened to be industrial organisation and the theory of regulation. When I was in college, most of the economics that I studied was in fields that I do not pursue now, although I think of myself as a very generalist economist, because as an economic historian I have to be open to just about any type of economics that will work and fit and be relevant to the subject and the period that I’m studying. But when I was in college, in fact, I was working in the field of industrial organisation, which is the theory of product markets, and when I went to graduate school, I went to the University of Chicago, because that’s where some of the great minds in industrial organisation and in law and economics were.

Did you have a mentor who influenced your career?

Claudia Goldin: The role models and mentors that I have had, have all been individuals who have been passionate about their subject. Beginning, as I said, with Alfred Kahan, who is known as Fred Kahan, he was passionate about regulation. In fact, he served as the head of the Civil Aeronautics Board in America, and he deregulated the airlines, and that was effectively getting rid of the Civil Aeronautics board, so probably in the history of heads of agencies, he may be one of a very few number of people who actually dissolved the agency that he was the head of. That deregulated the airline prices and brought down airline prices in America, and led to the formation of many airlines that we no longer have, but that were very small airlines such as People’s airlines. When I went to Chicago I was fortunate enough to have a large number of extraordinary mentors and people who mentored because they were passionate about their subjects. Gary Becker, for example, was one of the individuals. Robert Fogel was another one of the individuals. These are the people who in some sense guided me more and more towards away from industrial organisation towards labour economics and towards economic history. Although I must say that they would not have been unhappy if I studied industrial organisation as well.

How do you maintain your focus and motivation?

Claudia Goldin: I don’t think that I could survive without such a curiosity. We just had a wonderful lunch in which we started talking about the history of cooking and the history of food, and why it is that certain countries have hard bread and certain countries have softer bread, and what is it about the mill of wheat and the use of water power versus wind power? That was just a lunch. I started thinking about other issues in culinary history. I don’t necessarily do culinary history, but in some sense, we all do culinary history. It’s simply a questioning about every single thing that we do, and we think about. The beauty of being an academic is that we can pursue any part of it. The beauty of having wonderful students, as I have, and I have had for all the years I’ve been teaching, is that I can mention these to my students and have conversations, and maybe they will pursue it as one of the essays that they will write, or maybe even a book one day. I do have a student right now who’s working on certain aspects of culinary history.

Where does your curiosity come from?

Claudia Goldin: I don’t want to say I was born with it, because that will be discouraging to certain people who will say, was I born with it. I think that it’s something that you feel as you are walking around our complicated world, a listening to news, thinking about people who don’t know and their travails or their happinesses that you want to know more about them. You want to know more about their history, you want to know more about their countries, you want to know more about the history of that, and this adds and becomes much, much larger.

How did you celebrate the news of your prize?

Claudia Goldin: It was celebrated by … I remember we went to a press conference at Harvard. My husband, Larry, one of our students, Dev, came over that morning and our dog Pika, and we all walked to 1 Brattle Street to the press conference. All of us went to the press conference. Then we walked from the press conference up to Littauer where our offices are, and we walked up the steps, and I was greeted by, oh, I don’t know, 150 students and faculty. It was a beautiful day. It was a gorgeous day. It was October 9th, and the sun was shining, and the sky was as blue as it could be over the gorgeous buildings at Harvard and the steeples. It was a lovely celebration of being with students and faculty. Of course, it was saddened by the war in which at the time wasn’t necessarily a war, but the capture of hostages of Israelis, that really saddened it terribly, so it was a bit of a mixture. I tried to feel a celebration, but I also felt a certain amount of pain.

What was your first reaction to the news?

Claudia Goldin: That’s going to be my little two minute. My first reaction was that I had to do something very quickly. We had an hour and a half to get up and get ready for the announcement, so it meant that we had to take the dog out and we had to make a little breakfast, and we had to take showers. I had to think hard about a long part of my life’s work and write something up, and think about what I would say and all the people I would want to thank. I sat down and we did all of that, then I sat down, and six o’clock came and I realised that something that I hadn’t thought would happen is that emails just started piling up in my only account. It’s not as if I had a private account and a public account. I knew that I had to work through these emails to find the ones that I needed, for example, from the Nobel Foundation, from close relatives, from close friends. Then I realised that it wasn’t a hundred emails, in a very, very short period it became almost a thousand. We went to the press conference and then came back and I started reading them thinking, how am I going to work through all of these? I needed something special, some superpowers. As I was reading them, I realised that many of them started out with the phrase “I cried”. It started out with, “I am so joyful”. These were statements of people, of course, I didn’t know, who felt that I had made their work validated, I had uplifted them. I gave them pride in who they were. Through these many joyful and jubilant emails, I found the strength that I needed to read all the rest. For me, it was an award that was clearly given to me, but I felt that it had been magnified thousands of times over by what I was hearing in these emails.

How important is collaboration in science?

Claudia Goldin: It’s a very interesting question and would have to be answered on many levels. On one level, there’s been collaboration in many types of science. We can hear our friends in chemistry and physics particularly in the biological sciences, or thinking about the Higgs boson, for example, which was a collaboration of hundreds and hundreds of people where we have science that is made up of so many multiple things that are needed. Economics had been different. It had been the way science was once done where a person, one person, would strike out and do something themselves. I think, for example Bob Fogel and, and Gary Becker that we were just talking about. Economics now is far more collaborative. It’s rare. It’s rare that someone will write an article by themselves or write a book by themselves. I have done a bit of that, but I also work collaboratively. When I first began working collaboratively, there were very few women to work with, so most of my early collaborations are with men, and one with someone who is brilliant and insightful and also my husband, and that’s Larry Katz. I love working with Larry Katz, but now I also work with women, Claudia Olivetti, who will be coming tomorrow or the next day. So I have finally been able to work with women. I wrote an important paper with Cecilia Rouse, for example. It’s wonderful working with smart, intelligent, collaborative people, but working with women is also adds another element.

Tell us about the dogs in your life.

Claudia Goldin: I will say, I have never brought a dog into an archive. Even though the dog looks like in the graphic, it’s in the archive, the dog has never been in the archive. When I grew up, I had no pets. I lived in the Bronx in New York, and I didn’t know anything about dogs. My first dog was when I was in graduate school, so that’s pretty late for most people. She was a phenomenal animal, her name was Kelso, but I didn’t have that much time to do very serious training with her. I’ve really only had three dogs. Thank goodness, two of them have lasted a very long time. Pika is 13 now, and I hope he will be with us for a couple more years. I started doing a competitive work with dogs, and Pika happens to be an incredible centre, meaning he … Whenever I say centre, it sounds like it’s a football player. I love training the dog. I love getting to know the dog, getting deep into the mind of something that we really do not understand, of course. But in addition, the dog is companionship, and finally it brings me to another group of people, my dog friends, the people I train with, the people I track with, the people I go scenting with, the people I train with in terms of obedience. Just like any sport, it brings you to a different wonderful group of people.

What advice would you share with young scientists?

Claudia Goldin: It’s very simple. Follow your passions. If you’ve gotten involved in this subject, there are questions that you have, and those are going to be your passions. Just keep on following them. Don’t think that you will easily find an answer, that sometimes going about and looking for description, understanding what happened, understanding its history, understanding how it impacted people. Even talking to people can help you a lot. Our students today are obsessed with finding the best causal identification. That’s sometimes difficult. It may be the gold standard, it may be exactly what we want, but it may not be always be attainable right then and there, and it may be that you’re asking the wrong question until you observe. But if you keep the passion, if you keep the passion to answer the question you’ll do very well.

What’s the best way to overcome obstacles?

Claudia Goldin: You just keep on going. I mean, some of the biggest failures I have had are funny stories, they become really funny. The biggest failures are when I thought I was after some important set of documents, and I found that I couldn’t get the documents, but sometimes it’s taken me to a place on Staten Island, which was supposed to have a set of documents from Citibank. It was one of these Ironman facilities that in which Citibank gives over its information every day to this place. They card it away, and they put it in boxes, and eventually they destroyed what’s in some of the boxes, but some of the boxes are supposed to be kept indefinitely. I was after those types of boxes, and not to get into the immense amount of difficulty I had, but I was coming with a letter from the CEO of Citibank to this Ironman facility, and I walk in with this letter and the person looks at me like, I have no idea what you’re here for. I’m looking up at the largest amount of boxes I have ever seen. It was something from some movie about hell on earth, just gigantic amounts of boxes. We checked through many of them. For this person to pull the boxes, the person actually had to be on a cherry picker. That’s how many boxes there were and the potential difficulties of getting them down. No, I never found what I was after and wasted several days, but that’s what happens.

Did you feel alone as a pioneering woman in your field?

Claudia Goldin: I don’t think I’ve ever felt alone because one always has other friends, other women friends. In part one feels alone because there are moments when you feel that there are clubs and that you’re not necessarily a part of the club. But I don’t think that I felt terribly much alone, and maybe that’s because going to Bronx High School of Science – science was as an institution at the time – was disproportionately male, so I didn’t feel very much alone.

Do you have advice for young women in economic sciences?

Just like when I was a graduate student, and all of the fields were mainly male fields. Today, it is the case in economics that some of the sub-disciplines are more made up of more women than others. It would be very nice if more women became macro economists and econometricians, because we need you there.

Why is diversity important in economic sciences?

Claudia Goldin: There are two aspects of this. One is, why don’t we get diversity? and the other one, what is the role of diversity? I have dealt a lot with the first one, I can say a little bit about the second. Men and women often look at disciplines like economics slightly differently, and occasionally they’re both wrong. In my work on undergraduate women in economics and trying to figure out why economics isn’t doing as great a job as many other disciplines, despite the fact that women are just as good at math as men, and economics is a very math intensive subject, more than the biological sciences, for example, possibly more than chemistry is, not necessarily more than physics is. I thought about – this was several years ago – why it is, and realised that many individuals are making this decision before they even go to college. Many of the reasons why they’re making these decisions is what gets discussed at the breakfast table with their parents and what they read in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post or whatever, newspaper or social media they’re reading. Economics to many people looks like finance, but it’s not finance. Finance may be a part of economics, but economics is not finance.

Many of the young men, when they go to college and they’re asked before they go to college in the summer, what would you like to major in? Give me three subjects, and they’ll put economics down as one, and you’ll ask them why. They’ll say, because economics is finance and I want to go into finance. If you ask the women, why didn’t you put down economics? they’ll say, because economics is finance and I don’t want to go into finance. Both of them are wrong. They should both go into economics because of what economics is and not what economics is not. That’s part of the issue that diversity is important because men and women, or individuals of different ethnicities or races, may somehow believe that they want to get something out of a field. It’s very difficult to know what the field is until you take it, until you have appropriate exposure to it. Because some fields, as I said before, are not taught in high school or they’re not taught well enough in high school. Even the fields that are taught in high school, like history, may not be taught the way they’ll be taught in your college, but some fields simply aren’t taught. That’s one reason why we should want to have more diversity maybe related to why we don’t have enough diversity.

But the other reason is what do we get from diversity? This is much larger a subject. Within economics, it’s very clear that what we get from diversity is not simply having different views across the board, but the fact that women and men are tending to go into different parts of economics. If economics is 10 or 12 subfields, women are tending to go into one set of subfields and men are tending to go into another set of subfields. Therefore, all these years not having enough women means that those subfields were populated by a much smaller group of individuals, and one of them happens to be help.

How do you try to encourage diversity in economic sciences?

Claudia Goldin: Oh, absolutely. I devised with a group of people this undergraduate in economics, let’s call it a program. We came up with a large number of ways so that economics is seen as what it is. Economics is about people, and it’s about various aspects of people’s relationship to each other and to markets and to the world of economics. We devised it so that when freshmen or first year students too come in the door of universities and economics departments are able to give them information that demonstrate to them what economics is about and what economists do, that economists really do work with people. They work on inequality, they work on health, they work on economic development and so on. There are various ways of doing this so that it is not believed by first year students that within the social sciences, psychology deals with people and economics deals with just markets or money or stock markets and so on – that economics is about people. If undergraduates realise that economics … I mean saying economics is not about people to me as a joke, but that’s what many, many people think, that economics is not about people, and if they do believe this, it’s our failure not to tell them that that isn’t true.

How would you describe a good teacher?

Claudia Goldin: One of the problems that we face in economics is that we create our subject as a set of courses that begins with economic theory. Economic theory then is pushing students away from the notion that economics is about people, because economics then becomes about a set of abstract ideas. In the sciences, in physics, for example, it would be more accepted that physics is about abstract ideas, but economics really isn’t about abstract ideas. Yet we’re teaching them that economics is about these abstract markets. But a talented teacher should be able to blend the two. I would describe a good teacher as having an idea, a subject that you want to convey, and conveying it in a way that you could see in the eyes of a student is making them surprised and interested and inspired. If you can’t do that, you haven’t reached the individual.

You named a recent article “Why women won”. Why did you choose that title?

Claudia Goldin: First of all, the title “Why Women Won”. The article is a beginning exploration of mine. A gift that we academics have is that when we have a question and we have some time, we can sort of go about trying to answer it. My question was, I know where women are today and I know where they once were, how did they get to today? That’s sort of why women won. That does not mean that women have won exactly what they should win, or that along the way all women won what they should have gotten. But it is a statement that where we are today is very, very different from where we were in my own lifetime, not when I was born, not even when I was in college, but when I was in graduate school, and even when I was an assistant professor at Princeton. What women have today in terms of their legal rights is phenomenally greater. What their legal rights are in the workplace, what their legal rights are in the credit market, what their rights are with regards to their family, with regard to their name, with regard to their body, with regard to contraception – and the list goes on. What women’s rights are in America as well as in many parts in the world, are much, much greater. That does not mean that these rights are rights that they always have. That does not mean that these rights are the rights that they can easily begin to take advantage of, but that these are their rights.

Watch the interview

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