A Practical Idealist Makes An Interesting Economist

Wang Dan, an Economist Intelligence Unit analyst, takes an interview from CCTV News. [Photo: courtesy of Wang Dan]

Her Harvard year was a curse and a blessing in one. Her time as a homeless refugee took its toll on her after she became a student in Harvard. On campus, Dan could feel the gap between her and the other students, which, given she was already feeling vulnerable, was the last straw on the camel’s back. Her self-confidence was crushed and she was convinced that she had no hope of winning the battle to eventually earn a PhD in economics. She let go herself and succumbed to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She started to suffer from sleep disorders, kidney problems, and skin infections. The depression lasted for half a year, during which time the question that her microeconomics professor, Edward Glaeser, asked of his students, "What’s your intuition?” haunted her and drove her further into despair. She was good at math, but she didn’t know how to come up with intuitive answers to economic questions because of her limited life experience out in the world of money and work. Before Harvard, she was a good student with a promising future; at Harvard, she felt like she was drowning.

Connie was one of the many people who helped to save Dan. Credit also goes to Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught positive psychology. Dan came across him in another moment that seemed like yuanfen (缘分) – a kind of belief held by many Chinese people that there are encounters that are destined to occur. One day, Dan lingered in a classroom after her lesson was over. She ended up sitting in on the next class, where she heard about positive psychology for the first time. She would later sit through the whole course and, armed with new knowledge, she slowly walked out of her PTSD.

Another professor who helped mold Dan into the person she is today is Martin Weitzman. Dan studied environmental economics with him, and he would later recommend her to the PhD program in the University of Washington. She was one of a group of five students who studied with Weitzman, a class in which she excelled. As I sat down to write this journal, the news arrived that Weitzman had died. “Without him, I might not have been able to enter the University of Washington, and I heard that many people say that he was a strong candidate for a Nobel Prize in economics,” Dan said to me when I messaged her to break the news.

It took Dan seven years to get a doctoral degree at the University of Washington, longer than the average student. She started her schooling there with almost no skills in research or public speaking, and she had barely enough English to understand her classes. Luckily, as part and parcel of her course, Dan was given a teaching job on campus and for five years she taught Olivier Blanchard’s book on macroeconomics. Doing this job helped to build her proficiency in English, addressing questions, and in delivering public presentations.

Other than building up her academic abilities, seven years in Seattle was also long enough for Dan to get familiar with American lifestyle. She became a coffee lover, listened to jazz, and learnt yoga and hip-hop dancing. Her time in the United States also changed Dan’s personality, her outlook, and her values. Dan said that before she went to the United States, she was calm and carefree. The experience of Hurricane Katrina certainly made her more jumpy, but having survived those traumatic years, she grew to cope with her bouts of nervousness. As she readied herself for graduation, she was doing well both academically and in life more generally.

Wang Dan, an Economist Intelligence Unit analyst, takes an interview from CGTN. [Photo: courtesy of Wang Dan]

In order to finish her dissertation, Dan needed a quiet place to hide away from the world and knuckle down. Her longtime guimi (闺蜜)，which is a trendy Chinese word for a woman’s best female friend, Sally, offered her space unconditionally. Dan lived the life of a hermit in her guimi’s home in Beijing for three months. When she told me that one of her greatest inspirations during these months was the home-cooked dinners, I didn’t think she was serious, until she said that she thanked the cook, her friend’s father, in the acknowledgements section of her dissertation. Sally’s father is a first-class Huaiyang cuisine cook.

One of the five advisors who signed off on Dan’s dissertation was Susan Whiting, a professor at the University of Washington, who introduced her to an economist called Scott Rozelle at Stanford University. Roselle got her an introduction to his friend, Huang Jikun (黄季焜), a well-established agricultural economist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dan became a member of an agricultural research program led by Professor Huang.

This first job was a healing one. She still felt burnt out and the three years she spent deep in the economics of pigs and cotton as a post-doctoral fellow helped her to recover from the bruising experience of finishing her PhD. I asked her, “Are you now fully recovered?” Yes, she said, adding, “Pigs are smart, and cleaner than us humans, so please don’t get close and give your germs to them.”

Dan joined the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2015, a job that allows her to live in Beijing with her boyfriend and their two dogs. And it’s a place where she can be close to most of her friends. When I asked why she chose to live in Beijing rather than Shanghai, which is often considered more comfortable, Dan said that for her, Shanghai feels too foreign, which like most Chinese people I understand to mean too international. “I was not brought up in that petty bourgeoisie way,” she added.

As someone who grew up in the 1960s, I found it surprising to be talking with someone from the 1980s generation who uses the kind of language more familiar to people from my age group. But after listening to her stories, I came to understand that Dan sees her place in the world as not only a product of her family and education, but also of the help she got from her friends after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. This experience has pushed her politics towards the left, as did witnessing the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Animal lover Wang Dan [Photo: courtesy of Wang Dan]

When the full impact of the mortgage crisis hit, she saw Washington step in to support the big players in the financial system, like the housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But while many of the banks were bailed out, everyone else wasn’t so lucky. Her roommate soon lost his job. He became a textbook case of what’s known in macroeconomics as a discouraged worker. These are people who aren’t counted as unemployed, not because they find work, but because they give up on trying – after two years, in his case. His situation was made worse by the fact that, like most Americans, he didn’t have savings to fall back on. Dan was also directly affected by the financial crisis: Her university cut her teaching scholarship, so she had to look for additional teaching work to make ends meet. The impact of macroeconomic conditions and government policy went from being theory to real pressures she was learning how to cope with outside the classroom.

The crisis made her reflect on the fact that all governments intervene in the market. The intervention by Beijing in China’s domestic markets has been a regular target of criticism by voices in the United States that think government should play a smaller role in managing the economy. But when a crisis came, Washington was prepared to bail out the mortgage lenders and the investment banks that caused the crisis.

I asked Dan how she reconciles looking at the world through the lens of rigid economic principles with her socialist impulse to help people. Dan said these two things can’t be reconciled, but just has to live with them. “After all those accidents and everything, I understand that there are certain things, certain social changes I want to see, and I want to be a positive addition to them.” When a person falls victim to disaster, it often takes the support of a group of people to help them bounce back. Dan is grateful for the people she has met who helped her. And she wants to pay them back by finding a way that she can use her knowledge to help others.