Professor Drazen: HSE Students Give Food for Meditation

From October 5 to 11, the Summer School of the International Laboratory of Decision Choice and Analysis was held at the Higher School of Economics, where Professor Allan Drazen (Department of Economics, University of Maryland, USA) served as the speaker. In a recent interview, he spoke not only about the importance of legislative politics in modern democracies but also about why he was struck by HSE students, why gut instincts are so important, and why theory is more important than practice.

— Professor Drazen, your lecture was about legislative politics. How did you settle on this topic, and what kind of response did you receive from the audience? Did they have a lot of questions?

— The lecture was about the specifics of modelling a legislature (how a legislature makes decisions) based more on mathematical models. The legislature may grant special favours and concentrate on responsible policymaking. Legislative decision-making is central to representative democracy.

— You have considerable experience in teaching. How would you compare students in Russia, the U.S. and Israel?

— I have been teaching for many years. I started working in the area of political economy in the 1990s, and at the same time I started teaching. I was quiet impressed by HSE students. A number of students not only clearly understood the material very quickly, but even in the first lecture they were asking very advanced questions. I think that the students here are well trained and very bright; I was quite impressed by their level.

— The Russian education is known to emphasize the study of theory, whereas European and American students focus quite a bit on practice during their education. Russian students may therefore be lacking in practice, and the other in theory. What are your thoughts on this?

— I think that is why my lectures were well received here. They involved a lot of theory. My view regarding practice is that you can’t really make good decisions and you can’t make correct decisions on what to do without having theory behind you.

— But there also can be problems without practice.

— There can be problems because sometimes you do theory just for the sake of theory. When learning the theory, I was very much motivated by practice, by real world problems. Personally, I think this is the best way because you won’t be lost in theory when you understand the purpose of learning it.

— What is your general impression after visiting the Higher School of Economics?

— I have very positive opinion of HSE. The students are quite strong and very clever; they know how to make strong arguments. I really enjoyed it. I would like to come back and spend more time here. Moscow is a very nice city. And HSE seems like a really nice place to do work. As I said, what impressed me most is that several very good students in my lecture asked really good questions. They were questions I had to think about, which is a sign of really good students. I discovered something new for myself, because I had never thought about some of the issues they raised.