In graduate school in New York, around 2005, an older lady approached me with a question. She asked me whether I thought I was good at maths. I said yes, I thought I was OK but there were much smarter people out there to talk to. The lady answered: Before I go find them, can I ask you some questions? I'm stuck on a few technik-y bits.
Jan Tanner Poskas didn't take no for an answer. She said she had no head for mathematics, statistics, or econometrics, but her questions, when I brought her through some of the derivations of the BLUE for example, showed that she really did get the point of the estimation process, it was the steps in between that got her muddled.
I asked Jan questions, and got her to work backwards from her correct intuitive endpoint to the start, and she got it right away. Jan taught me you can teach people by talking at them, or by asking them questions and bouncing off their answers. I use that trick every time I teach.
Jan saw the end of things much too quickly it seemed. Jan taught me that intuition can be as important in economics as deduction from axioms and induction from data.
Keynes made the point technicians miss: to be a good economist you need to have the maths, yes, and you need to have the data crunching skills, yes, but you also need to have some 'sense' of what is going on, and what went before, if you are going to try to understand the economy. History is very useful, but so is just staring and using your common sense. One of the best examples of Keynes' views are in his his eulogy of Alfred Marshall (.pdf):
But the amalgam of logic and intuition and the wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise, which is required for economic interpretation in its highest form, is, quite truly, overwhelmingly difficult for those whose gift mainly consists in the power to imagine and pursue to their furthest points the implications and prior conditions of comparatively simple facts which are known with a high degree of precision.
Jan had the power to imagine, and I loved her for it. She got me to see beyond deriving stuff for the sake of deriving.
By the way: It wasn't that Jan had no head for figures. A prominent financier for decades, Jan's company made lots of money. But she wasn't interested in that, so after meeting her husband, the eminent painter Peter Poskas, Jan retired from finance and began thinking about ethics. She taught ethics for many years and began her PhD in economics at the New School in the 2000s. She kept asking questions.
"What's the point of economics Stephen? Why should we study this stuff? What are the maths for? What's the right thing to do?"
Jan's questions were always the same: deep, to the point, and tinged with a strong social conscience.
When I was organising my wedding in 2006, I invited Jan. She couldn't come, but she asked could she make the flowers for the wedding and have them sent up? I said of course. The flowers were beautiful, and made the wedding really special. For a present, she and Peter took my wife and I to the Yale Club for lunch, where we learned the true meaning of the word 'pretension', and got a good story out of the experience to boot. In a thank you note, Jan gave me a present that basically changed my life. I'll always be grateful to her for it.
We continued to correspond through her illness. She sent me a Christmas postcard of her, Peter, and her grandchildren this year. I had been meaning to respond, but it slipped my mind. Now I won't get the chance.