walbourn | AEA in SF

cuddlyeconomist and I spent the weekend down in San Francisco. She was attending the Annual Meetings for the American Economic Association, although she was mostly hoping for some interviews while down here. I came along for moral support and as an excuse to hang out in San Francisco with her. We stayed downtown, and we were only a few blocks away from where I stayed for various Game Developers Conferences in the past.

The conference had a fair number of attendees. Not enough to actually host in a convention center, but around 1000 people. They accomplish this mostly by sharing annual meetings with at least a dozen related groups. According to

cuddlyeconomist they always have their annual meetings just after New Years to ensure the cheapest possible hotel and convention space rates. They host a social event one night with a little bit of food, and the entertainment was a live band made up of economists. Other than a few hosted cocktail socials for particular groups, and the job interviews, the only reason to attend is because you are presenting a paper. Well, the exhibits are also good if you are an economic book or financial analysis software nerd.

The presentations are held in small rooms in the hotel, and after five years they’ve managed to get VGA projectors in addition to the transparency projector on which most of the speakers rely. PowerPoint and/or LaTEX presentations. Very modern—given that all the speakers I saw were in their 60s, it would be correct to characterize the profession as not particularly appealing to the young. There were a number of sessions on the subprime mess, the credit crisis, and the financial crisis generally which no doubt were full of profound observations that will be as unheeded as they are impractical and useless. It is also the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s lesser known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I expect you will never hear of it again.

I learned a number of things about the economics profession during this event: Firstly, they all believe that the entire field of economics is boring except their own sub-discipline. Second, all the fields of economics are in fact really boring.

The was actually a bit of a ‘treat’ this year at this conference. It hosted the first (and perhaps last) ‘economics humor’ session. It included On the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson; Too Smart to Run, Too Dumb to Fly; Mankiw's Principles of Economics, Translated; and Three Novel Applications of the Lucas Critique. The last I’m assured is terribly funny and kills at economics conferences based on the title alone. It was in fact a rather funny series of routines by stand-up economists. You can even see one of them on the YouTube.