For Beren Professor of Economics N. Gregory Mankiw, the leader of one of Harvard’s largest courses, economics is not just a day job.
The Ec 10 professor typically wakes up in his 1930s brick colonial in Wellesley between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. to take his border terrier Tobin for a walk. Tobin, who is named after Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, is the brown-furred successor to Keynes, Mankiw’s last dog. The real-life Tobin was a follower of economist John Maynard Keynes, as well.
After walking Tobin, Mankiw rouses his 14-year old daughter so that she can catch the 7:00 a.m. bus. He says his daughter enjoys math and history. “I always took that as a sign that she may be a future economist,” Mankiw says.
Even Mankiw’s first conversation with his wife was about public policy. “We were both grad students. I was at MIT, and she was at Harvard at the Kennedy School,” he recalls over a Greenhouse Café salad in his Littauer Center office, where economics journals of every color are crammed onto massive shelves and complicated formulas are scribbled on a chalkboard.
“We started chatting at the train platform at South Station, and I sat next to her and we chatted on the Amtrak train, and that’s how we met,” he says. “We had sort of a natural common interest, because we both had policy interests, and then we started dating and got married.”
Mankiw pursued his interest in public policy in Washington from 2003 to