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Taiwan's Future Leaders

The Badboy Economist

The Badboy Economist

Source:cw

NTU Economics professor Ming-Jen Lin likes to think outside the box, using the tools of economics to explore the mysteries of human relations.

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The Badboy Economist

By Jerry Lai
From CommonWealth Magazine (vol. 468 )

Ming-Jen Lin is the young Taiwanese economist to keep your eye on.

Upon receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2002, he returned to Taiwan to take a teaching position at National Taiwan University, where he was made an associate professor in 2007. Three years later, he attained a full professorship – more quickly than anyone else in the history of NTU. His CV also includes Taiwan's two most prestigious awards for any young scholar: an honors research fellowship for young academics at the Academia Sinica, and the National Science Council's Ta-You Wu Memorial Award.

Whenever someone calls upon T.J. Chen, an NTU economics professor and former Council for Economic Planning and Development chairman, to name a few exceptional young Taiwanese academics, Lin's name always comes immediately to mind.

While presenting as a pedigreed scholar straight out of the academic ivory tower, deep in his bones Lin is possessed of a rambunctious spirit that boldly defies convention.

Because his grandfather was imprisoned during the February 28 Incident of 1947, Lin's family opposed his entry into the social sciences and instead prodded him to become an engineer. After beginning studies at NTU Department of Agricultural Engineering, however, he came across a copy of the textbook Economics in Theory and Reality by NTU's "Gang of Four" economics professors – Chang Ching-hsi, Hsu Chia-tung, Liu Ying-chuan and Wu Tsong-min – and became fascinated with the notion that one might actually be able to apply the theoretical principles of economics to explain a variety of problems inherent in human relations. He subsequently passed the entrance exam for NTU's Department of Economics and formally transferred there against his family's wishes.

In a column appearing in CommonWealth Magazine, he urged young people not to blindly believe the notion continually spoonfed them by the older generation that they were simply not cut from the same cloth as their predecessors. He laughs recalling being himself so berated from childhood through adulthood. Interpreted from an economic perspective, senior colleagues of the older generation regale young people with the importance of their economic skills because they fear what they have learned is rapidly depreciating.

His seminal paper, "Can Hepatitis B Mothers Account for the Number of Missing Women? Evidence from Three Million Newborns in Taiwan," addressed the conspicuous gender imbalance in Asian demographics, and posed a bold challenge to his mentor, another economics badboy, Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt.

These works were born of an intellectual dispute between two Nobel Prize winners. Indian economics laureate Amartya Sen contended that the "missing women" in Asian demographics were a consequence of gender bias at birth resulting in the use of selective abortion and other practices. Nobel Prize for Medicine recipient Dr. Baruch Blumberg argued that Asian mothers' relatively higher incidence of hepatitis B infection, which has been associated with a higher male/female sex ratio at birth, was the culprit behind the discrepancy of the "missing women."

Blumberg's research caught the attention of Harvard doctoral candidate Emily Oster, who subsequently included Blumberg's research results as part of an article published in Journal of Political Economy, where Steven Levitt is an editor. Levitt was apparently so impressed with Oster's paper that it was published with unprecedented swiftness.

Despite his mentor's praise for the work, something didn't quite sit right with Lin. Armed with valuable data on birth mothers in Taiwan provided by former Department of Health minister Chen Chien-jen, Lin subsequently proved that sex ratios at birth for Taiwanese mothers were within the statistical norm for the first two children; by the time of the third child, the interjection of "human choice" into the equation becomes marked, as the male/female ratio soars in favor of males.

His research results were published in American Economic Review, one of the big four international economics journals, and clarified the dispute between the two Nobel laureates.

Lin's doctoral dissertation was also rooted in social rebellion. While in university he was active in the Wild Lily Movement, a student movement of the early 1990s agitating for political reform. During protests at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, a white-collar office drone in a starched suit admonished him: "Why are you stirring up chaos in society like this?"

On arriving in Chicago, Lin chose democratic government and social stability as the themes for his doctoral dissertation, demonstrating that while democracy does indeed lead to an increase in petty crime in a society, serious crime decreases with greater involvement of social resources.

After demonstrating his high-caliber academic firepower, Lin – a self-described showoff – is now putting the tools of economics to use on research he hopes will have even broader influence.

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy

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Keywords:

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