Dean R. Glenn Hubbard

Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics

 

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today on this very special occasion.

You should take time on your graduation for congratulations: to yourself for hard work, good ideas, and perseverance – and for pursuing a path of ideas at a time when easier and more remunerative paths lay before you. But you should also take time to thank those who helped you – friends and spouses, and especially your teachers, who invested in you and are proud of what you have accomplished and what they expect you to accomplish.

This spirit of “graduation” is fine. But I prefer the more old-fashioned term commencement as you begin your journey in the academy, non-profit or government sectors, or industry.

I am an economist, and it is said that an economist is someone who takes something that works in practice and proves to you that it can work in theory.

I want to do that for you today about the U.S. economy. A major goal of any society is to advance material well being steadily over time – generating rising living standards to fund needs ranging from education to health care, defense to homeland security, and basic research to innovation. Economists will tell you that the key to long-term growth and advancing living standards is increases in productivity, or greater output per unit of input.

The United States is enjoying a significant expansion of productivity growth. Given the role that innovation in general and information technology in particular has played in our economy, it is tempting to draw the conclusion that it is the science of innovation that is the key to unlock growth.

Tempting perhaps, but not completely persuading: Among the world’s industrial economies, only the United States has enjoyed a sustained increase in productivity growth. Scholars in economics and management identify both science and social science (in this case, economic institutions and management practices) as being responsible.

And this connection traces back in no small part to a lifetime of contribution by the late Harvard economics professor Zvi Griliches, a teacher and mentor of mine when I pursued my own Ph.D. Zvi’s early work in the late 1950s on productivity growth in hybrid corn production set the stage for understanding growth in a focused way. By the time I arrived at Harvard in the late 1970s, Griliches was a leader among economists in organizing teams of economists to work together to understand productivity growth in firms and industries. Fifteen years later, Zvi led an effort to apply these broad findings to public policy and to important empirical issues of how we measure output. Zvi Griliches was a scholar whose work continued to reach out to others.

He was, in short, a “bridge builder.”

Your own careers will also likely begin with your own particular research interest, then migrate to the topics vexing your discipline, then to using your skills to solve problems in the world – from biotechnology to health care; from physics to our understanding of the universe; from social science to the needs of an aging society; from arts to culture.

There is a poem I like that describes an older man who had a journey to make on foot. And the journey took him through a river in a deep canyon. After crossing it, he stopped to build a bridge across the river. The poem reads in part:

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,

“You are wasting strength with building here;

Your journey will end with the closing day;

You never again will pass this way;

You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide.

Why build you this bridge at eventide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head.

“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,

“There followeth after me today

A youth whose feet must pass this way.

This chasm which has been nought to me

To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.

He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;

Good friend, I am building this bridge for him.”

Bridge building is a task which Columbia and your professors have been pursuing with you in the classroom, the library, the theater. I am confident we have done this well and that you have made it over the bridge. On this special day, I want to urge you to build a bridge of your own for others to cross.

Over time, your greatest intellectual stimulation and satisfaction will come from bridge building – as a teacher and mentor, as a scholar and researcher, as an artist and performer, as a commentator and public intellectual, or as an advisor and public official.

Let me close with an observation. Commencement is a special term and a special day. The best opportunities in your field lie not in the past – or even today – but ahead.

Thank you.