The younger, high school and undergrad version of me was not the best person. My sense of humor was too dark and I didn’t much care about the experience of other people. When I went to grad school, I was so excited. I would finally be around other economists and I would be able to drop all of the niceties, empty social signals, and fuzziness that I thought non-economists employed. And I was oh so very wrong.

It turned out that economists are also human beings and that no amount of self-congratulatory Spock-praising would stop that from being the case. Indeed, with some candid feedback, I became convinced that I was in desperate need of the kind of prosocial norms that could help me to better produce social capital. In other words, I needed to figure out how to get along. Below is some advice that I’ve found pivotal. Maybe you can share it with another person who might be well-served by reading it too.

Below are six norms that are good to employ in order to improve social cohesion, agreeableness, and, frankly, better mental health. And these aren’t just for economists. I suspect that there are plenty of people (maybe young men) who can benefit from what took me too long to learn. So here we go!

Continue reading →