Rachael Behr LaRose's Mercatus Fellowship Story
From Two Interests to One Calling: How Rachael Behr LaRose Found Her Voice in Political Economy
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hen Rachael 's roommate suggested she check out economics in her first semester at Hillsdale College, she had no idea what she was getting into. "I had no idea really what economics was when I started my undergrad degree." But then she took a class with Michael Clark, a Mercatus PhD fellow who went on to teach at Hillsdale, and everything clicked. Clark showed her that economics wasn't a hard science full of stock market predictions and mathematical models. It was something else entirely. “Economics was not a hard science, that it's a social science and that there's so many interesting questions we can ask about people, that economics is about human behavior." He exposed her to Austrian economics, constitutional political economy, political economy itself. She was hooked.
It was a perfect place to marry my two passions.
But Rachael had another passion: political theory and philosophy. She loved Aristotle in her undergrad years. The problem was, how do you build a career around ancient philosophy? How do you take these two loves, economics and political theory, and find a place where they were taken seriously together? Most universities compartmentalized them. Most economics departments treated the discipline as math and data science. Most philosophy departments didn't care about economics at all.
Then she met Don Boudreaux, another Mercatus professor visiting Hillsdale. He told her something that changed everything: there was a place that married economics and political theory intentionally. George Mason University had a PPE program, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, housed within Mercatus. "He said it's a Mercatus PhD program is a PPE program, politics, philosophy, and economics. So, I applied and it was the only economics PhD I applied to actually."
Her first major project crystallized everything. Working with Virgil Storr, who would become her dissertation advisor, she wrote a paper on Aristotelian friendships in the marketplace. Virgil understood her passion for Aristotle and her passion for economics. "He found a way to marry my two interests between economics and political philosophy. He said, cool, let's foster that passion. Let's figure out a way to make this a research paper that still has economics grounding, but has this political theory influence." Mercatus provided resources. They ran a survey of thousands of people, testing different sorts of Aristotelian friendship and how present they were in marketplace versus non-market systems. "It was a perfect place to marry my two passions."
The best experience by and far from the entire thing was my cohort.
But what Rachael treasures most about her fellowship is her cohort.
"The best experience by and far from the entire thing was my cohort," she says with no hesitation. During that first summer, studying for comprehensive exams, they committed to it completely. "You'd think people would be off doing their own thing, traveling, hanging out with friends and family. We were together studying the whole summer. We were working together, quizzing each other, grilling each other up at the whiteboard." They'd see each other at least once a day during the year, formally several times a week to study and work together.
What struck Rachael most was the absence of the cutthroat competition she'd heard characterized many PhD programs. "In many PhD programs, it's very cutthroat and you don't study together, you don't work together because if someone's doing better than you, you look bad and you know, there's only a certain amount of funding so someone could be pushed out. It's absolutely opposite at Mercatus. We work together. If someone doesn't understand something, we spend extra time to help learn it and teach it to that person."
The mentorship model at Mercatus, having a senior scholar assigned to each fellow, initially confused her. She came in thinking, "I'm here to serve another professor. You go to do their research and do work for them and be kind of a grunt worker for them. And then you end up being a footnote in the incredible research they publish." That's the model at most institutions.
"That was hard for me to adjust to because I think the conception of grad school that I had in my mind that's common elsewhere is that you go to serve another professor." But George Mason scholars are different. "They want to be peers with you, which was really hard to adjust to. I wanted to like serve, you know, my mentors and do what I could for them. And they were like, no, no, like, we're here to help you. We're here to foster your curiosity. We're here to help you learn skills."
The intellectual environment shaped how Rachael thinks. She learned to "speak a new language in political economy." She developed a habit of asking, whenever she encounters any problem: "What are the incentives? What are the institutional constraints? What are the informal norms going on the ground?" This applies whether she's in the classroom, writing a research paper, or just talking to a neighbor. "It's a new way to view the world. It's like a different language or a different set of glasses."
I came into my job market year at George Mason already having taught several courses.
Teaching during grad school set her apart on the job market. "I came into my job market year at George Mason already having taught several courses, which not many people have in grad school. They might've been a TA, but they probably weren't a full instructor on record for a class. In general, the way I think about questions in the classroom, the way I teach, that was all influenced by Mercatus".
For prospective fellows, Rachael's advice is direct. First: "Understand that the scholars you are assigned to, they really just care about you and want you to succeed."
Second: "Lean on your cohort. They also care about you and want you to succeed and nourish those bonds. Don't come at it from an adversarial lens. Those are going to be your friends for life. They're also going to be your colleagues for life."
Third: "Make use of all the incredible resources. Go to all the PPE workshops, go to all the reading groups, take them seriously. Go to conferences like Mercatus was willing to fund that for us. That's how I met so many people I've even written papers with at these conferences. So yeah, make use of all the incredible resources because they end up just paying off in huge amounts later in life."
Rachael is now a scholar and teacher disseminating political economy at Xavier University where she brings that Mercatus-style thinking directly to students. She emphasizes that economics is about human behavior, not just math. "You don't want those students to only take away from an economics course that it's all about math. You want them to take away the George Mason style thinking, right? The Mercatus style thinking."