Thayer Watkins 1967

I was born and grew up in the area west of Denver, Colorado. Upon graduating from high school I received a National Merit Scholarship which I used to matriculate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I did well at M.I.T., majoring first in Chemical Engineering and later Physics. But because of the climate in Boston and for personal reasons I transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder where I majored in Applied Mathematics in the Engineering School.

While attending college I worked summers doing technical work at a company that produced rubber goods such as belts, hoses and tires. One project involved measuring the degree of vulcanization of tires and hoses. The properties of rubber improve with degree of vulcanization (essentially cooking time) up to a certain point and beyond that they deteriorate. I naively presumed that the company wanted to achieve a degree of vulcanization that produced a maximum in quality but other engineers informed me that the target was not a maximum quality but instead something called an optimum quality that had something to do with cost. The engineers themselves were not too clear what was involved but they knew it had something to do with economics. Out of curiosity I started reading economics books from the company library on my lunch breaks. At the next opportunity I enrolled in the introductory economics class at M.I.T. Paul Samuelson was the star of the Economics Department at M.I.T. at that time. At the University of Colorado I continued to take economics courses as a sideline to my main interest in applied mathematics. The Economics Department at Colorado offered me a fellwship to pursue a Ph.D. in economics and it was an offer I could not refuse. Upon completion of my doctorate at Colorado I was offered a year of postdoctoral study at Yale University by James Tobin. At Yale I developed an interest in the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics, primarily the influence of capital market imperfections such as debt limitations on the time allocation of consumption. After that year I accepted an appointment at Memphis State University in Tennessee, primarily because of family ties in that area. After three years at Memphis State I spent a summer working as a consultant at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California and realized that I did not want live anywhere but California. I came to California and worked as an economic consultant in San Francisco working primarily in the area of regional economics. During this period I did leave the Bay Area for three semesters to teach at the State University of New York at Plattsburg. While there I founded the employee credit union.

In 1974 I received an appointment to the Department of Economics at San Jose State University and I have been here ever since. I did, however, have two visiting appointments. One was at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and the other was at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At SJSU I have been a generalist, teaching a very wide variety of courses. This has included macroeconomic theory, mathematical economics, urban and regional economics, corporate finance, speculative markets, public finance, institutional economics, cost benefit analysis and welfare economics, computational economics and other computer applications in economics, a survey course on the major economies of the world and courses in economic history.