eric zou

Chris Sims, In Memoriam Long 3 part 🧵 I was asked to write a short paragraph for Princeton collecting memories of Chris Sims. But when I started writing, I just could not stop. I might as well share it with my friends and colleagues rather than having it sit unread in the cloud. It has taken me a few days to process the news of Chris Sims’s death. He has been such a large presence in my life, as in the lives of so many of his former students. Chris arrived at Princeton once I had already started graduate school, at a time when I had the tremendous luck of working as a research assistant to Michael Woodford. I remember vividly what his arrival felt like to us — the students. It was as though a new force had arrived with the gravitational pull of the sun. His office was right next to the common room at what was then the economics department at Princeton. His door was always open, or ajar. And the pull! Like everybody else, I felt it. It was a unique experience finding myself within the gravitational fields of two of the greats, Mike and Chris, running between them like a little puppy, hanging on to every word. I can remember the moment like yesterday, in early fall in Princeton, watching Chris arrive at the economics department, and thinking: “I want to be like that!” I saw Chris as my ultimate role model. I don’t mean that I thought I would ever scale his intellectual heights. I mean it in a different but quite specific way. When Chris arrived at Princeton he was already famous — one of the most senior and eminent macroeconomists of our time — as he remained until his passing. Every morning he came to the department riding his bike, always in relaxed jeans, carrying a backpack that looked like he had borrowed it from a grad student — a grad student who had not allocated a big part of his budget to one. What I hoped for was certainly not the backpack or the bike. What Chris embodied to me was something rare: the pure intellectual — not the fame, not the status, but that fire. The ongoing excitement like that of a first-year graduate student about ideas, maintained perfectly intact throughout the most distinguished career in the field. That excitement burned hot all his life and showed no sign of cooling off. There was also something else — something harder to name but impossible to miss. Chris moved through his professional life with a kind of ease that seemed to belong to a different category of person entirely. Many academics treat the profession as a game: working around the clock, managing their visibility, strategizing which journal to target and writing accordingly. If a student asks for an appointment, it may be scheduled two months later. I recall emailing Chris if he could talk as a grad student. Immediate answer: Sure just pop by now. If Chris had office hours, I was never aware of them. He was just there, door half open. He would arrive at the office late in the morning, unhurried. I once realized, happening to share a train with him to DC, that he typically wrote his conference discussions on the way to the conference itself — and would usually give the best discussion of the day. That was not carelessness or indifference. It was just the effortlessness of someone for whom crisp thinking was as natural as breathing. He had time for everyone because he could do in five minutes what would take most of us a day — or perhaps a career. If you asked him a question, he would typically give you an answer; but on the rare occasion when one did not immediately pop into his mind, he was just genuinely, openly excited about figuring out the answer, and it made no difference to him who was asking. 1/3