Home Cooking: the economists’ meetings on Zoom

Economic Principals stayed home from the Allied Social Science Association meetings in San Antonio, Texas, because he had other things to do. Then the other things multiplied – it is that time of year – so he decided to wait until next week to begin a project he planned.

So, what are we missing in San Antonio?  With Covid the meetings slowly take on a very different structure.  Peter Coy, of The New York Times, reported last year that attendance was half its recent average of 13,000 persons. That is far below the 15,000 or more members who sometimes came in years past.

A sea change in hiring hall probably accounts for most of the drop. Previously, newly minted PhDs gave job talks to departmental hiring committees locked away in high hotel suites. Now promising candidates are offered flyouts or invited to give talks on Zoom. The airlines, convention hotels, and good restaurants lose out.  More economists will probably turn up next year in San Francisco.

Indeed, select sessions of the meetings themselves are now streamed.  You can see the list here.  I missed Argentine economist Ivan Werning’s talk on inflation on Friday. I heard him talk on Markus Academy a few weeks ago. He knows what he’s talking about.

I watched Susan Athey’s presidential address yesterday evening, a dazzling review of the experiments that economists are running on the internet these days, for companies, governments, non-profits, and economists themselves. Six years in the Oughts as senior consulting economists for Microsoft Corp. and two years, just ending, as chief economist for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, have increased her authority substantially.

Her lecture was preceded by introductions of Gabriel Zucman, winner of this year’s John Bates Clark Medal, and five newly-elected Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association: Guillermo Calvo; Drew Fudenberg; Olivia Mitchell; Maurice Obstfeld; and Christina Romer. I plan to watch Emmanuel Saez give the sole Distinguished Lecture tomorrow, on inequality.

Missing from the streamed session was behavioral economist Ulrike Malmendier’s lecture, “The Long-lasting Effects of Past Experiences in Economic Decision-making.”  She thinks consumers, investors and policy makers sometimes incorporate long-lasting memories of personal experience during especially significant events, such as the Great Depression, or life under communism, into their decisions instead of responding to what they read in the newspapers. You can read here her “Memory of Past Experiences and Economic Decisions,” prepared for the Oxford Handbook of Human Memory.

EP couldn’t agree more. Hence the smidgen of history that begins here next week.

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