In its 21st year, the Helvidius Group is starting a new effort to to give readers in and outside of the university a chance to get to know Columbia professors a little better and to gather expert advice on the best ways for undergraduates to pursue their research interests.

We are kicking off the series with prominent economist and student-favorite, Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin.

Dr. Sala-i-Martin specializes in growth and development economics. He has constructed the most accurate calculation of the World Distribution of Income to date and is the editor of the Global Competitiveness Report. In October 2008, he was named the Grossman Professor of Development Economics at Columbia. In addition to being one of the world's most cited economists, he is the founder of Umbele: A Future for Africa and serves as treasurer of Football Club Barcelona.

Our publisher Gillian Kemmerer caught up with Professor Sala-i-Martin between frequent treks to Barcelona.

[Helvidius Group]: So how did you come to pursue a PhD in Economics?

[Xavier Sala-i-Martin]: Well initially it was coincidence. In Spain, you have to choose your major when you finish high school. In other words you go to economics, or medical school, or law school as an undergrad. You choose when you don't know anything about your choices. You know what doctors are because you've been to a doctor, and you know what lawyers are because you've seen movies, and then the rest you don't know anything. You don't know what economists do or what geologists do, right? Anthropologists, historians, you don't know. So since I didn't know anything, I asked my parents who was the richest member of my family and it turned out to be an uncle of mine and I asked what he studied. They said "economics," and that's why I went to economics school. Then in my second year, I encountered a brilliant professor who was visiting from San Diego and then I started to like microeconomics, mathematical economics.

[HG]: Then what brought you to pursue growth & development instead?

[XSiM]: I graduated from Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona and went to graduate school at Harvard. As an undergrad, I liked mathematical economics so I went to Harvard to study mathematical economics. At the end of the first year, I worked with Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia during the hyperinflation of 1995. Up till then, I had lived in a middle class Barcelona home and I did not know what poverty was; I went to Bolivia and I really saw poor people for the first time. That was when I decided it was the most important thing economists should do. Then I went back to Harvard and coincidentally Robert Barro had just been hired. It was the time of the endogenous growth revolution which started at University of Chicago. At Harvard, I did not learn anything in endogenous growth—any growth—because it was not fashionable at the time. Barro brought economic growth and started teaching it, but I had not learned it as a student and had to be a TA for Barro. The best way to learn was to write lecture notes, and they turned out to be quite useful to the Harvard students so they circulated them to MIT students and MIT students to Princeton students, and then the notes got into the hands of a publisher at MIT Press. They asked me if I wanted to publish, and I said, "Do you know who I am? I'm just a student." And they said, "But these notes are really good. We want to publish them." So I talked to Barro and we decided to publish them jointly--and that became the book, Economic Growth.

[HG]: What advice would you offer to students embarking on economic research for the first time?

[XSiM]: I would tell them to think before they read. Students who do research for the first time have the tendency to go to the literature and read everything. If you read everything, the first consequence is that you believe or are led to believe that everything has been done. And then you get depressed. I know many students who have huge piles of papers they've read and they're completely depressed. So my recommendation is always to think of a problem of the real world. In our case, think about a problem with the economy, not an economics problem, not something learned in class. If you try to do research from what you learn in class, then you will try to see what the model looks like and instead of an alpha you have a beta. I'm not interested in the literature, I'm interested in the economy. So look at the real world and find something you're interested in and ask questions. And before you go to the literature, try to answer. How do you think about this?

Go to the mountains, forget the books, forget your laptop, sit under the tree and think for a few hours. Take a long shower—6 hour shower—without books, notes, or email and think how would you solve the problem. First you need to ask an interesting question, then how would you solve it, and then when you have an idea you go to the literature and see how other people have done it. In this way, you go to the literature knowing what you want to see. Has anyone thought about this before? Chances are someone else has done it. That is going to take an afternoon to realize, and then you go and do it again. If you read and read and read, you take six months, and then after all that you realize that you are depressed. And it's important that you look at the real world for two reasons: one, because that's what is important, and two, because chances are you are going to like it. Doing research means spending lots of time solving a problem. If you don't like it, if you're not passionate about it, you're not going to spend lots of time. You will procrastinate every time you sit in front of a computer and you're not going to do research. You have to be obsessed in order to do it. In order to be obsessed you have to love it. And chances are you are going to work hard at things that you like.

[HG]: We would now like to move on to questions about the current state of your own research specialization, growth & development. Earlier this week, China pledged $10 billion in aid to sub-Saharan Africa, the largest in the continent's post-colonial history. However, many scholars have framed the question politically, raising concerns that China's presence in Africa erodes state sovereignty and is a catalyst for human rights abuses. Given China's unique "no-strings-attached" strategy toward aid-giving, do you think it could be a positive economic alternative to traditional Western forms?

[XSiM]: If the consequence of aid is that they're going to have slaves, or prisoners working inhumane amounts of hours and inhumane standards that's obviously not good. If "human rights violations" are that they work cheaper or at lower rates than Americans are capable of competing with, then it's not such a big problem. It's a US problem, not a human rights problem. A lot of protectionism takes the form of human rights violations or environmental violations—that is the new fashion, the new way we use protectionism. Having said that, I don't think we or the Chinese are good at designing aid programs. I would be more interested in the Chinese investing in firms in Africa rather than aid. If they designed this as an aid program that's a problem, but if they designed this as an investment program then that's a good idea. Poverty in Africa will not be eliminated with aid the way it wasn't eliminated in China. It will be alleviated by the creation of wealth, the creation of jobs, and so far the Chinese have been much better than the West at creating jobs in Africa. If you go to Africa, a five star hotel, you are going to see three kinds of people, none of them black. You will see Western NPO workers, you will see South African businessmen, and you will see Chinese businessmen. Africans see the Westerners and they say they need money. When they see South African or Chinese businessmen, they ask for a job. And that is what will get them out of poverty, not our charity, but our jobs.

[HG]: Shifting domestically--when Barack Obama refused to give up his Blackberry, The Economist ran a series asking various authors what they would say to the President if they had his phone number. We would like to pose the same question to you: what words of wisdom would you pass on to the Obama administration?

[XSiM]: I think it would be pretentious of me to give advice to the President of the United States. Let me tell you what I don't like about what he has done—and I don't know what he should be doing—but the problem I see with the way he & all the Western leaders have handled the crisis is something that philosophically is funny. The crisis was generated by huge imbalances; essentially, American families were borrowing too much. This led to the subprime crisis, this led to excess deficits with respect to China, this led to all kinds of problems. Excess borrowing by US families. Now the way to solve this disequilibrium situation is by equilibrating. And the way we have solved it is by creating another disequilibrium even bigger which is not only the US families are borrowing, but now the government will borrow even more. The way to solve, again, this disequilibrium is to create equilibrium, not to create another off-setting disequilibrium. This will have to be equilibrated sooner or later; the debt will have to be paid, the deficit will have to be closed. No matter how you think of it, the way to close the deficit is going to be painful. Increasing taxes is painful because it creates another recession, lowering government spending will be painful because it also creates another recession, inflating the debt away is painful because it is like collecting a tax, and then inflation has to be lowered. In order to decrease inflation, we will have to increase interest rates which creates another recession. The only way to solve the problem is to generate such a huge increase in productivity that with the same taxation, you get much larger tax collection. This means that we need to work really hard at being productive and competitive, promoting private enterprise. It looks like we're moving in the opposite direction by introducing more barriers, more regulation, and less business. So, I would not give advice. That would be pretentious. But I would say the way we have done things is dangerous.

[HG]: So having received your thoughts on everything from the Chinese aid debate to Obama's Blackberry inbox, there is one more thing we have to ask: how many colored jackets do you actually own, and is there a method for choosing what color to wear each day?

[XSiM]: 350. That's cheating a little bit—it's only 170 but I have 2 of each type because I travel back and forth between New York and Barcelona. I don't travel with a suitcase so I have to have the same jacket in both places.

[HG]: And the method of choice—does it depend on your mood, the weather?

[XSiM]: I wake up and I feel orange, or yellow, or Indian, and that's what I choose. There is no specific way. I try not to repeat the same jacket within a year.

[HG]: How do you keep track?

[XSiM]: I put the jackets I've worn in the front of my closet. I have a big line. The first jacket is always the one I wore yesterday.

[HG]: Well I suppose most importantly, where could we purchase a Xavier jacket if we wanted one?

[XSiM]: You can't because they are made for me. I have 3 tailors: one in Beijing who usually does the silks. He has my size and everything so I just send him a fax with the color and he produces the jacket in a matter of days. I have another one in Bombay—he usually produces the cashmeres and winter jackets. I have another one in Barcelona for the things I buy in Africa. I don't have a good tailor in Africa, so I buy the cloth there and send it to Barcelona.

[HG]: One of the questions we received was a request for your tailor's number. I suppose we would have to get three.

[XSiM]: Well, I need a good tailor in the United States but haven't found one yet. You can call Barcelona.