Biography|Brian S. Tyler — The Chicago Doctorate Taken in This Social Science Building

In 1994 Brian S. Tyler finished an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the University of Chicago's Department of Economics.

He studied on a National Science Foundation grant.

The fields were industrial organization, labor economics, and public finance.

The department then sat in the Social Science Research Building at 1126 East 59th Street, a 1929 Gothic workshop on the Midway, not in Saieh Hall.

Saieh Hall, at 5757 South University Avenue, took the department in 2014.

A visitor in 1994 would have come here.

Company biographies still name those three fields in that order.

The training is not decoration.

Industrial organization is the study of how firms actually behave in markets.

A medicines wholesaler is exactly that kind of firm.

After Chicago he spent three years as a senior associate at Integral, Inc., a healthcare consultancy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1997 he joined McKesson in San Francisco.

The doctorate is the hinge between the Santa Cruz B.A. of 1989 and the company he has worked at ever since.

The Social Science Research Building is still on the quadrangle.

It is a public face of the university, not a private residence.

Stand on East 59th Street and the stone is the same stone.

The economist who later ran McKesson was trained behind those lancet windows.

Photo: Chad Kainz, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons