Scott Wolla of the St. Louis Fed interviews Gary Hoover on his thoughts about teaching economics (“Gary Hoover: Teaching with Purpose,” July 1, 2025, transcript available). Here are a few excerpts, but there’s more in the full version:
How he got interested in economics
I’m a student who is in high school, and I’m watching my mother. At times my mother would have up to three jobs that she would work, and she’d work very hard at those jobs. Her mantra to me was: “If you just work hard, we’re going to get ahead.” But that didn’t seem to jive with what I was seeing. I mean, she was working very hard, but we never seemed to be getting that far ahead. I was told that by working hard, this would make one quite financially successful. But if that were the case, then I believed that my mother should be some type of millionaire, maybe even a billionaire, if it was just hard work that was necessary.
I suspected that my mother should have been rich. She wasn’t. So, I went searching for answers to that specific question: Why is it that just working hard didn’t always guarantee moving up the economic ladder? And where did I go to find answers to that question? … I initially thought about economics when I was asking these questions. So, I went to a high school teacher who was actually a social studies teacher. She said, “Look, the questions that you’re asking, about hard work and economic success, they can be addressed through economics.” … What she ends up doing is contacting the only African American economist that she knows—the late Walter Williams. … And she says, “I’ve got this young man who is interested in economics, and he’s asking these questions about inequality and race, and I don’t think that I have the right way to answer him. Could you please answer him?”
What Walter Williams does is he starts sending me his books. Interestingly, he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know who I am. I’m some kid in a high school in Milwaukee, and he is a distinguished professor at George Mason. But he sends me his books, and we start a correspondence that lasts for the rest of his life.
So, even though later on I become an economist—I go all the way through graduate school—I still keep up with him. Later, our economic reasoning, our economic thinking, really diverged to the point that I don’t think we ended up seeing the world the same way. But I was so grateful that this person who did not know me reached out to me and started sending me books and kept writing back and forth with a high school junior—not corresponding with Nobel laureates—a high school junior who had one simple question about his mom. That was what kept me in economics.
Admiring the toolkit?
I often tell my graduate students who are getting ready to finish up their Ph.D.s: “Look, my job is to transform you from a student who is looking for the answers to a scholar who’s looking for the questions. I’m actually looking for the good questions—that’s what a scholar does. Because a student needs to be given tools, I’m going to give you a toolbox. I’m going to give you tools that will allow you to find equilibrium and to take the second derivative. So, I’m going to give you a big bag of tools. And then you have to go out as a scholar and find the interesting things to build with them.”
I find economics interesting in that economists are the only people who have a toolkit, but they would build a very nice-looking house and then spend all day admiring the hammer—that I find to be quite odd—as opposed to saying, “Look, look at what I can do with this!”
Would you as a student have wanted to take the class you are teaching as a professor?
We, as economics instructors, need to quit thinking about ourselves in the front of the class and start remembering ourselves back in the class. Would you take a class from you? Are you good enough to teach this class? Are you doing it well enough?
If I went back in time, I’d tell myself [as a student]: “Pay attention, because there are several things I never want you to do when you’re up front. But there are some things I want you to do. So, I want you to watch.” And I’ve got to say that I think I’m at the point where I’m ready to teach previous me. It took only 35 years, but I think I’m ready to teach the class that I could actually appreciate. And I think that that’s where we, as economics instructors, have to be. Would you take your class? Would you?
