Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Greg Duncan

Good morning and congratulations to all of the graduates and proud parents assembled here today.  It is a pleasure and great honour for me to be standing before you on this occasion. In the academic areas in which I work, Essex holds an uncontested position in the top tier of universities in the world. That it sees fit to award me this honorary degree means a great deal to me.

My formal academic training is in economics. But, as you will soon discover, careers in particular and life in general are most satisfying if viewed  as an uncomfortably haphazard sequence of opportunities. What is crucial is that we are willing to take some risks and learn from them.  Let me illustrate with two personal examples.

While standing in front of the TWA ticket counter at New York’s Kennedy airport, I struck up a conversation with a woman, named Dorothy, who, 18 months later, would marry me, and 18 years later is sitting with our children Ellen and Paul in the audience. We flew in and out on different planes, and had just enough of a snow delay to have a couple of hours to get to know one another. That’s what I call a haphazard opportunity.

On the professional side, I began my university studies as a mathematics major. When I switched to economics, my mother could not conceal her disappointment. “Greg” she said, “Economists are a dime a dozen.”    I began my graduate training in economics at the University of Michigan convinced that I would become a theorist. But then I started working as a research assistant on this fascinating survey data collection project called the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

I devoted the next 25 years largely of my life to this single, extraordinary project. Beginning in 1968 and continuing today, the project has conducted annual interviews with a representative national sample of 5,000 American families. The gathered data provide an exceptionally rich historical record of the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary American families in the last third of the 20th century.

All of the European Community countries have since launched similar studies. A team of social scientists here at the University of Essex began theirs a decade ago. Data from the fruits of their efforts  - the British Household Panel Study – are universally recognised for their quality and utility. Moreover, Essex has used this study as a magnet to attract a top-flight interdisciplinary team of social scientists.

These studies reveal surprising turbulence in the economic fortunes of families. Incomes fluctuate a great deal from one year to the next, producing many transitions into and out of both poverty and affluence. And, children who grow up and leave home often do not share the economic fates of their parents.

Sometimes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the opposite is more often the case. Data from Britain, America and other countries challenge academic and popular conceptions of unchanging social class and predictable life-cycle changes.

The search to understand the consequences of these economic fluctuations constitutes an important frontier for social science research. Under what conditions does economic deprivation or volatility affect health or children’s development? My own work suggests that the economic component of poverty, especially persistent poverty, occurring early in childhood, does indeed have important detrimental consequences on children’s achievement.

This line of work is particularly exciting because of its interdisciplinary nature. Insights from economics, sociology, developmental psychology  and history are all vital. The world will continue to look to the University of Essex to provide leadership in these efforts.

Our studies also offer lessons for newly-minted university graduates such as yourselves. Despite stories of joblessness, economic opportunities for the educated have never been more favourable.

But our findings warn that even a university degree does not protect us from the volatility of income, job and family change. What it does provide is the set of skills needed to cope with and profit from such changes.

Although today may mark the end of your formal education, most lifetime learning is informal, and it only begins today. Your training and talents will equip you to capitalise on future opportunities. But to do so requires an open mind and a willingness to take risks.  And surely with the privileges you enjoy, you will devote some of your energies to helping the less privileged members of our societies.

Again, congratulations on your degrees. May you use them to do well, and to do good.