A well-deserved tribute to Nick Rowe

As you may know, Nick has retired from teaching. His career as a teacher and blogger has earned him this very nice tribute in the pages of The Economist:

Learning macro is a source of anxiety for many students. Teaching it can give their professors the jitters, too. The subject is notoriously difficult to explain well. During his 37 years at Carleton Mr Rowe remained, by his own admission, “fairly low down the totem pole” as a researcher. But he became a thunderbird at conveying macroeconomic intuition. In the past decade this served him well in his second intellectual career, contributing to Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, an economics blog. Many a controversy has benefited from one of his ingenious analogies or numerical parables, usually involving some kind of fruit.

 

 

Comments

[Jacques René Giguère]

I didn't knew that Nick's bragging side. In most West Coast culture, the lowest character on the pole is the strong one who support the rest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_pole
Enjoy your retirement!

[Market Fiscalist]

I hope Nick has only retired from "formal" teaching. I have learned so much from his blog posts over the past few years and I hope that part of his career will continue - looking forward to lots more apple and banana parables!

[Nick Rowe]

Thanks Stephen! But you are the one who deserves all the credit for starting WCI, and persuading me to join, and very patiently holding my hand when I was so scared of this highly technical new-fangled blogging thing. You really did open up a whole new chapter in my career and in my life.

Thanks Jacques Rene and Market Fiscalist! My blogging has been light recently, because I've been doing a lot of canoeing, travelling, and gardening, and other old retired guy stuff. But I think I will be back at it more later.

[psummers]

Well deserved indeed!!

I've included what I call “Rowe's Law” on my money & banking syllabus for several years. I don’t have the original blog post handy, but it goes something like “the value of any financial asset, like money, is always and everywhere determined by promises written on pieces of paper, and its value changes when people change their beliefs about those promises.” I tell my students that's the 30 second version of the whole semester and I’ll see them at the final exam.

I also had the privilege of having Nick as a colleague briefly in Australia.

Congratulations Nick, and enjoy the canoeing!!
Pete

[John Chant]

I met Nick at the Bank of Canada well before his blogging career. He was (and still is) a provocative thinker who challenged conventional thought. His blogs, and I'm sure his lectures, encouraged the critical thinking that should be the essence of a university education.

Have not seen him since the Bank of Canada but have kept in touch though his stimulating and refreshing blogs. .

Good work Nick. Enjoy your retirement but get back to the blog soon.

[Majromax]

Regarding Rowe's Law, it's described in 2016 in terms of liquidity of IOUs, along with an earlier post that same year adding a mathematical definition for finance folks.

It's implicitly used in a 2010 article to explain why we don't use everything as money, despite having the technology and sophistication to do so.

Rowe's Law, combined with general monetization, also provides a mechanistic explanation for the global financial crisis (or: why mortgage defaults in the US caused a recession in Europe): counterparty risk caused many "soft money" assets to collapse in value, but central banks did not treat it as a fall in "the money supply" and thus did not mitigate the money-supply shock.

[kevin quinn]

I haven't been reading much in the blogosphere lately, but Nick's posts are without parallel. He runs a high-quality seminar via blogging: nothing else compares! Thanks, Nick

Kevin Quinn

[Jeremy Fox]

All the best in your retirement, Nick, and glad to hear you plan to keep blogging. I've learned a tremendous amount from your posts over the years. They're the best advertisement possible for considering simple cases in order to sharpen one's intuitions and get insight into more complex cases. Your posts helped inspire me to try my hand at some "explainer" posts in my own field of ecology. Addressing widespread yet unrecognized misunderstandings is one of the most important activities any teacher can engage in, and one for which blogs as a form are well-suited. Looking forward to learning more from you for as long as you care to keep it up.

[Per Kurowski]

“To show their appreciation, at the end of his long teaching career, his students gave him an apple and a banana”… and they duly hoarded the mangoes… since they do not come from a country where mangoes are too abundant, like Venezuela, with its runaway inflation
https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/1999/03/of-mangoes-and-bananas.html

[Ian Lee]

I distinctly, vividly - and in abject awe - recall watching Nick Rowe teach Intro Micro AND Intro Macro on Carleton ITV shortly after I was hired in the late 1980s.

Nick taught in the cavernous, dark, steeply upward banked Theatre A beside Southam Hall. There were perhaps 8 giant green blackboards that slid up and down or left and right.

But here is the kicker. He had NO Powerpoint slides and he had NO visible notes of any kind.

He drew - DREW - by hand - with CHALK - endless - I mean - hundreds and hundreds - of intricate, complex graphs upon graphs for 3 hours straight - no notes, no visible memory aids - week after week.

Finally, extreme curiosity caused me to corner him in the tunnel corridor.

"Nick - you don't seem to have any notes - right - when you are teaching? Are you nuts?"

He said, "ya, I have some scribbled notes but try not to use them".

I said what in god's name are you going do if you forget one of your hundreds of graphs - class after class?

I recall he said to the effect the thought terrified him and kept him awake at night.

Those who never saw Nick lecture, missed a giant in action.

Through all the years, the Sprott business students worshipped Nick Rowe - above ALL the other economists - because they told me year after year.

About 3 years ago, I asked one of my incredibly sharp finance students why he and other students thought so much of Nick.

His profound response - "Prof Rowe speaks in English - not equations. He understands what he is teaching us. He understands the meaning of the graphs and the meaning of the equations in markets - and he explains that to us".

Nick's retirement is nothing less than an enormous loss for the Economics Department and the Faculty of Public Affairs and Carleton University.

[Ingrid Bryan]

I read the tribute in the Economist yesterday. Well done Nick! If it is any comfort to you after having been retired for 13 years I still dream of not finding my classroom, being ill prepared, and turning up to lectures without shoes. While I have taught Intermediate Macro, I have given full Micro lectures in my dreams with no difficulty, but never Macro!

[Livio Di Matteo]

Well I finally got my copy of the Economist yesterday in the mail - I am in Thunder Bay I guess - and congratulations Nick on the well earned tribute. Your students will miss your insights.

[Pete Bias]

I'm very late seeing this (I practically gave up on looking at this site and took a glance just in case) and I want to once again congratulate Nick on his retirement and his absolutely exceptional teaching methods. I paid him the compliment earlier, but it is worth repeating.
Congrats Nick!

Pete Bias

[Nick Rowe]

Pete, John, Majro, kevin, Jeremy, Per, Ian, Ingrid, Livio, and Pete: thank you so very much for your comments. Reading them really made my day/week/month. Hell, ***it made my career***. I didn't really know how to respond, without triggering my imposter syndrome. But, as you can see, I've written another post. I will probably keep writing some posts. But one of the really nice things about being retired is not having as many commitments. So that's just a forecast (for whatever economists' forecasts are worth), not a promise.

[Nick Rowe]

And thanks so much to Bob Smith and Devan too (their comments are stuck in the spam folder).

[Patrick]

Enjoy your retirement, Nick.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insights on WCI over the years. I eventually learned enough from you to know (and your fellow WCI contributors) that lurking was really my best option (better to remain silent ...), but I still check-in regularly and always learn something puzzling over your postings.

Congratulations and best wishes.

[Oliver]

My own little tribute

[W. Peden]

Very well deserved!