New Economic Thinking at AEA 2019

Jan 7, 2019

This year’s American Economics Association conference featured INET researchers, a cocktail reception, and a new interactive poll

Earlier this month, INET went to Atlanta for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association (AEA). We were thrilled to see so many of our staff and grantees speaking on panels and joining us at our reception, including: Peter Temin, presenting his INET working paper on mass incarceration as well as speaking on a panel on economic history; Mario Seccareccia on central bank policy; Alan Kirman and John Davis speaking on ethics and economics; Orsola Costantini and Carlo D’Ippoliti discussing household debt; David Weil on stagnant wages; and a host of economic historians participating in panels, including Petra Moser, Joachim Voth, Melinda Miller, and Beatrice Cherrier (a full list is below)

Our senior economist Orsola Costantini also opened our cocktail reception with a celebration of a year of pathbreaking research, and a rousing call for more pluralism in the economics profession:

It feels right and appropriate to celebrate the many very important papers and research projects that are being presented here and that we supported. Too many to do them justice, but let me mention one: Peter Temin’s work on inequality and the social construct of race which I am glad to see is receiving much-deserved attention at this conference. We are proud to have supported his work from the very beginning. His book on the vanishing middle class, that started out as an INET Working Paper, unites scientific rigor with passion for justice. To me it was a lesson, an example of how economics can in fact serve society.

INET prides itself on providing a rare open space for rigorous dialogue, where we can exercise what our Academic Council member Prof. Sheila Dow has called “structured pluralism”— that is, the use of provisional, non-dualistic, categories to define different approaches and make communication possible across the discipline. Not because we have to think that everyone is somewhat, at least in part, right or because we recuse ideological differences, but because all approaches, in one way or the other, invariably tell us something about reality.

To mix things up this year, we also played an interactive game at our conference booth. Visitors got to vote on three important questions facing economics, by dropping a ball into a tube under each answer: