I first met Randy Simmons when we were both graduate students at the University of Oregon. He was seeking a Ph.D. in political science, but like me when I was in urban planning, he decided to get a different view of things by taking a course in urban economics. I was in my first term as a student in economics and they assigned me to be a teaching assistant in the course he was taking.
I had already taken urban economics, but the course I took was for graduate students and the course he was taken was for undergraduates and included a lot more basic economics while the graduate course focused on modeling. As a result, I was a terrible T.A. because I didn’t yet know much about basic economic concepts such as elasticity. Yet Randy and I got along because we were both interested in environmental issues.
By 2000, Randy was the chair of the Utah State University political science department. He had studied and written about public lands, endangered species, and wilderness (and since then has written much more). But he really thinks more like an economist than a political scientist, and today he is in Utah State’s economics department. Continue reading
