S2E37: Casey Mulligan, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Recently, the University of Chicago Press published a book entitled The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. It was written obviously by Gary Becker who died almost 10 years ago at the age of 83 after an extremely long and fruitful career as an economist. Dr. Becker had many students — some like me were students from afar, but some, like our guest today, were his actual students. And today’s guest is Casey Mulligan, one of the editors of that aforementioned book, and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. This was a fun interview to do. Casey walked us through his time at Harvard as an undergrad to his unusually rapid progression through Chicago’s economics PhD program where he stayed on and is now a professor. We discussed his own career but we also spent just a lot of time discussing what it was like with Becker, as well as his own later time at the Council of Economic Advisers. I hope you enjoy it!