Immigrants’ grandson
Joshua David Angrist was born on September 18, 1960, in Columbus, Ohio, where his parents were graduate students at Ohio State University. His mother, Shirley Sarah Bloomstone Angrist, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household on Montreal’s Saint Urbain Street, the working-class Jewish neighbourhood of Mordecai Richler’s novels; her parents had come from small towns in Lithuania in the 1920s, and her mother’s parents and other relatives who stayed behind were murdered by the Nazis in 1943. A teacher had pushed her to change her name from Sarah to Shirley, implying that Sarah sounded too Jewish. His father, Stanley Angrist, grew up in Dallas in a family from Ukraine and Poland; his grandmother’s family had fled pogroms in Odessa after 1905.
His parents met at a Hillel-run Jewish summer camp in the Catskills and married in 1955. Both became academics in Pittsburgh, his mother a sociologist and among Carnegie Mellon’s few female faculty, his father a mechanical engineer who later wrote for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. Joshua grew up in Pittsburgh with two younger brothers, Misha and Ezra, and his family belonged to Congregation Dor Hadash; he had his bar mitzvah there. In 2018 a member of that congregation was among the eleven people murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue attack, a tragedy he says deepened his family’s bond with the city.
An indifferent student finds his subject
By his own account Angrist was an indifferent student at Taylor Allderdice High School, happier in the print shop, in a theatre group at the Jewish Community Center and in his basement darkroom. In middle school he took part in Pittsburgh’s experiment with busing for racial balance, an experience he later recognized in decades of research on schooling. He left school after eleventh grade and spent more than a year working in group homes and institutions for people with disabilities before enrolling at Oberlin College in 1978, admitted from the waiting list.
Economics became, in his words, a lifelong love affair. He needed tutoring in maths at first but worked his way to an honours thesis, and an Oberlin econometrician taught him in a class of one. He spent his junior year at the London School of Economics, where he was tutored by Partha Dasgupta. The visiting examiner for his honours thesis, the Princeton labour economist Orley Ashenfelter, offered him a place in Princeton’s doctoral programme.
Israel
Before taking up that offer, Angrist followed another path. In London he had been troubled by hostility to Israel among British students, and a visit to his grandfather’s siblings on a kibbutz drew him to the country. After graduating in 1982 he enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, met his future wife, Miriam (Mira) Poznanski, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and became an Israeli citizen in 1983. Declining a deferment, he served two years in the Israel Defense Forces as a paratrooper in the Nahal Brigade, including deployments in Lebanon as the war there wound down, followed by six months of farm work on a kibbutz. He and Mira married in 1985 on Kibbutz Ein HaShofet.
He then went to Princeton, earning his Ph.D. in 1989 with a thesis on the Vietnam-era draft lottery. After two years at Harvard he returned to Israel as a lecturer at the Hebrew University from 1991, and in 1996 joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Ford Professor of Economics. He holds both American and Israeli citizenship.
His years at the Hebrew University were among his most productive. After the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics allowed him to become the first scholar to work with individual-level data from the labour force survey of the West Bank and Gaza. He used it to study how an influx of Palestinian university graduates lowered the economic return to schooling in the territories, and how the first Intifada, by disrupting the supply of Palestinian workers to Israel, revealed how much Israeli employers depended on them. He later wrote that he came to resent reserve duty for taking him away from research and his young family.
Finding cause and effect
Many of society’s biggest questions are about cause and effect. Does more schooling raise earnings? Do smaller classes help children learn? Did military service help or harm those who served? Comparing people who did and did not get an education or join the army is misleading, because they differ in many other ways. Randomized trials, the gold standard in medicine, are usually impossible for such questions. Angrist’s answer was to find natural experiments: situations in real life where chance or arbitrary rules sorted people into groups much as a lottery would.
His thesis used the Vietnam draft lottery, which picked men for military service by drawing birth dates, to show that service in the Vietnam era reduced veterans’ later earnings by about 15 percent. With Alan Krueger he used the fact that children born early in the year can legally leave school sooner than those born late in the year to estimate how much an extra year of schooling raises earnings; they found about nine percent. In Israel, with Victor Lavy, he used Maimonides’ rule, the class-size cap of 40 pupils, which causes classes to split abruptly when enrolment passes 40, to show that smaller classes raised the test scores of fourth and fifth graders. It was one of the first uses in economics of what is called a regression discontinuity design.
He applied the same approach to many other questions. With Daron Acemoglu he found that employment of people with disabilities fell after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, suggesting the law had unintended effects. With Adriana Kugler he found that rigid labour market rules can increase job losses among native workers when immigration rises. With William Evans he used families’ preference for having children of both sexes to measure how family size affects mothers’ work. In 2016 he even worked as an Uber driver as fieldwork for a study of the ride-share business.
The LATE theorem
Natural experiments raise a subtle problem. A lottery or a rule may push some people into a programme, but others take part or stay out whatever happens. What, then, does the experiment actually measure? In a 1994 paper, Angrist and Guido Imbens answered precisely: a natural experiment of this kind reveals the effect on the people whose behaviour was changed by it, which they called the local average treatment effect. With the statistician Donald Rubin they connected this to the modern statistical theory of causation.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that the framework radically changed how researchers approach empirical questions, and that, together with David Card’s work, it revolutionized empirical research. The committee noted that the approach has spread to other fields beyond economics. Angrist has also done much to teach them: Mostly Harmless Econometrics (2008) and Mastering ’Metrics (2014), both with Jörn-Steffen Pischke, are widely used textbooks, and he has championed teaching econometrics as the study of cause and effect.
What works in schools
Much of Angrist’s later work has used these tools to find out which school policies help children. With Parag Pathak and others he used the lotteries that oversubscribed charter schools must hold to compare students who won places with those who did not. Their research documented large gains in test scores at Boston’s charter schools, particularly for low-scoring students and those learning English, while finding small or no effects for some other school models. In New York and Boston they found that elite exam schools, despite their reputation, had at most brief and modest effects on the achievement of students who narrowly got in. With colleagues in Colombia he found that private school vouchers raised secondary school completion and test scores. In Israel he and Lavy found that teacher training could raise test scores cost-effectively, while computer-aided instruction did not.
In 2011 Angrist and Pathak founded MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, which has grown into Blueprint Labs, a non-partisan research lab that works with school districts and government agencies on education, health care and the workforce. The lab studies questions such as the effects of Boston’s universal preschool programme and how to design fair school assignment systems, and supports a collaborative that funds and shares charter school research. Angrist’s methods have also been used to evaluate job training programmes, financial aid and labour market policies around the world.
Family and Jewish life
Angrist’s Jewish identity runs through his story: Yiddish-speaking grandparents in Montreal, relatives murdered in the Holocaust, a great-uncle’s family on a left-wing kibbutz, a congregation in Pittsburgh, Hebrew University, service in the Israeli army and a wife whose parents survived the Holocaust and met in a displaced persons camp in Italy. He and Mira, a social worker, have two children, Adie and Noam, and live in Brookline, Massachusetts. In 2020 he volunteered as a participant in the Phase 3 trial of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, and said he thought often of his father, who had contracted polio a few years before the Salk vaccine arrived.
In 2021 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Imbens and Card, Angrist and Imbens being recognized for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.
Legacy
Angrist helped change what counts as evidence in economics. Before the work of his generation, many conclusions rested on correlations that could not separate cause from coincidence. Today governments, school districts and researchers routinely look for lotteries, cut-offs and policy changes that let them measure what a programme actually does. That shift means public money is more likely to go to schools, training schemes and social programmes that work, and less likely to be spent on those that do not.
Sources & further reading
Joshua D. Angrist, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Popular information: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2021, NobelPrize.org · About, Blueprint Labs, MIT · Joshua Angrist, Jewish Virtual Library · Joshua Angrist, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.