Learning Economics Where Policy is Made Select Purdue undergraduates spend Spring Break in Washington, D.C.

Ben Van Kammen

09-21-2026

Allow me to start with my personal low point during my class’ recent trip to Washington, D.C. I fell down on the sidewalk while walking from Capitol Hill to the Congressional Budget Office, somewhere on 2^nd Street SW. I was coordinating the delivery of our lunch to the CBO office, navigating the group of students to the Ford Office Building, where the CBO resides, and I tripped over a concrete bollard in front of what I recall as the HHS building. I went down on the sidewalk, water bottle rolling almost off the curb, folder with my trip leader information splayed on the sidewalk.

No injuries except to my pride. Even my mood quickly recovered, though. Call it a “V-shaped recession.” Shortly we arrived at the CBO, received our lunch order, placed the pizza boxes on the belt so they could go through the metal detector and into the government building, and made our way up to the CBO offices to meet with its director, Dr. Phillip Swagel.

When planning this excursion, it was Director Swagel’s idea to make the format of our visit a “working lunch” at his office. I described the other activities I had planned that day: visiting the Hill, meetings with Congressman James Baird (Indiana's 4th congressional district) and a high-ranking analyst at the U.S. Treasury, and morning seminars with Purdue economics professor Aaron Hedlund (currently on academic leave and serving as a member and acting vice chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) and Holden Thorp with the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences. Director Swagel noted that it didn’t leave much time for lunch. He instinctively offered up his conference room and even suggested the delicious — and punny — “We, the Pizza” for lunch for my students. He later explained that it appealed to the parent in him to welcome in and feed hungry college students. Swagel impressed us all as a generous man, a dutiful public servant, and a wise economist. 

In the course of our working lunch, he made a point of going around the table, getting each of the 17 Purdue undergraduates to introduce him- or herself and hearing each student’s major and high school alma mater. Getting to know the students blended seamlessly into our discussion of the assumed growth rates to choose when forecasting the fiscal impact of the H.R. 1 legislation.

This anecdote is representative of the 2026 Spring Break week my class spent in Washington, D.C. We were there to study Freedom, Capitalism, and Institutions, the name of the brand-new Daniels School of Business class, which also goes by the code ECON 333. While the CBO’s economic analyses are unequivocally positive, i.e., concerned with facts and describing economic reality, we were trying to answer a question that was more normative, what kind of economic institutions we think we “should” have. In particular the class considered “thick” protection of economic rights, e.g., private property and entry into and exit from markets.

In class discussions, students grappled with John Rawls’ challenge that infringing on economic rights is justified for the sake of elevating the living standards of the least well-off. Crucially, I asked students to consider whether a set of institutions exists that can reconcile the apparent contradiction between protecting our rights and benefiting the worst-off.

Spring Break in Washington was the climax, where we observed the federal government up close and students talked with famous economists, examining American institutions and evaluating them compared to their theoretical ideals. My fall on the way to the CBO illustrates just how busy we were that week. Everyone who went on the trip came back impressed and with the shared sense that we had experienced something special. And “We, the Pizza” was delicious. We ate it all.