What if you could build your own dissertation committee from any current living scholars, regardless of the institution in which they resided?
Who would you choose?
I think that I would do an interdisciplinary PhD with a general focus on "governance" with the following members on my committee:
1) Edmund Phelps - Dynamism and Innovation
2) Elinor Ostrom - Institutional diversity
3) Daron Acemoglu - Revisionist History of Political Economy
4) Vernon Smith - Experimental, Bottom-Up Perspectives on Economic Behavior
5) Oliver Williamson - Explaining group behavior and governance mechanisms
6) Nathan Nunn - History of Economic Development
7) Fabio Rojas - Group behavior - particularly in the realm of politics
8) Douglass North - Revisionist history of economic growth
9) Justin Wolfers - Markets as Information Processors
10) Witold Henisz - The relationship between Government and Business - the good and the bad.
Why?
1) Research Agendas - They try to answer important questions. Go big or go home. Life is too short to expend precious human capital trying to be cute.
2) Methodological Diversity - multiple lenses are required if you want to see things clearly. No school of thought has an intellectual monopoly in the social sciences.
3) Data Focus - The plural of anecdote is data, and these people are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
4) Philosophical Inspiration - While they get their hands dirty, they do not believe that philosophy does not matter. They use data to refine world-views, rather than swearing off meta-perspectives.
