David Grether to be promoted to Professor Emeritus

David Grether, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Economics, is being promoted to Professor Emeritus at the end of the academic year, which is academic-speak for semi-retiring.  That is, Dave will continue to have an office and do his thing, but he will no longer teach and no longer draw a salary.  (The term emeritus is Latin for "fully merited" and was originally applied to retired Roman soldiers.)

Dave earned his B.S. at the University of California, spent some time in the U.S. Army, and earned his Ph.D. at Stanford. After a brief stint at Yale he came to Caltech in 1970.  I first met him in Alan Sweezy's macroeconomics class in 1971 or '72.  We had been told by Professor Sweezy that there would be a guest lecturer, so I was not too surprised to find that a very young and sleep-deprived-appearing graduate student from another department showed up to attend.  It turns out I was wrong—the apparent graduate student was actually Professor Grether, who proceeded to talk about the identification problem in econometrics.

Dave's dissertation was in time-series econometrics, but his interests were much broader than that.  He collaborated with John Ferejohn and Charles Plott on social choice theory in the early 1970s and in the the late 1970s he and Plott conducted experiments on how real people update their beliefs when given new information, making him a pioneer in what later became known as "behavioral economics."  Dave was also a pioneer in what later became known as "neuroeconomics," when he began using fMRI to study subjects making decisions under uncertainty.  His work was the first (or maybe the second, I'm not sure) to use fMRI to study economic decision making.  I recall the excitement that Dave exhibited when he showed off some brain scans and said, more or less, "We've found greed."

Dave also served as Chairman of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 1982 to 1992 and again in 2006–2007, making him the third longest-serving chair, after Clinton Judy and Hallett Smith.

On a personal level, Dave is also known for his thriftiness and his quick and extremely dry wit.  He is also a fan of the Golden Bears.