In this Kosmos podcast, Dan D’Amico, Phil Magness and Adam Martin recap the Southern Economic Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The three scholars discuss the most interesting panels, The Menger Essay Contest winners, the increased attendance at the IHS reception and the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics’ dinner, and some general conference advice.
Jeanne Hoffman: Welcome to this Kosmos Online Podcast. I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today, we are recapping the Southern Economic Association’s annual conference which took place November 19th through the 21st in Washington, DC.
Joining me to look back on the weekend are, Adam Martin…
Adam Martin: I am the Director of the Humane Studies Fellowship at the Institute for Humane Studies.
JH: …Phil Magness…
Phil Magness: Program Officer plus I work with American history students, but also economic history.
JH: …And Dan D’Amico…
Dan D’Amico: I am Assistant Professor of Economics at Loyola University, New Orleans.
JH: Welcome guys and thanks for joining us.
PM: Thanks for having us.
AM: Great to be here.
DA: Thank you
JH: First set to the IHS employees here. What was IHS’s role at the SEA?
PM: Well, IHS essentially visits academic conferences throughout the year and we do this for basically two purposes, the first is to kind of educate and inform prospective students about IHS programs. So we normally hold a reception where we put programs like the Humane Studies Fellowship on display for prospective applicants and the second is to continue to network with and check up on students that are already IHS alums that are presenting at particular conferences.
AM: So lot of what we do is especially have the reception, making sure if there is say a particular student that has a particular interest and we know a faculty member on our network that is there, we can make that connection right there. So lot of that action happens at these sorts of conferences whether it is at the reception or in sessions.
JH: So this year Duke University Professor Bruce Caldwell, who we have an interview with if you search Kosmos, was the Vice President of SEA, how did that affect the panel selections and overall turn of the conference?
AM: Well I think it affected the panel selection in two ways, one of which was, that among the panels on economics it shifted more and obviously in Austrian interactions since Bruce’s own interests are in Hayek and he has a long history with the Austrian movement, so there was actually a large number of sessions dealing with more Austrian themes on panels and the other main effect that it has that Bruce actually started inviting philosophers and interdisciplinary people to come and present. So John Hasnas, David Schmidtz, Jerry Gaus and a bunch of grad students from the University of Arizona for instance among other people that would be familiar to listeners of this sort of podcast where actually at the Southern Economic Association conference talking about the relationship between various philosophical issues and economics.
DD: Yeah I would just echo that I mean, whenever you get someone like Bruce in one of these leadership roles the conference is naturally going to reflect their professional and personal networks and so for example, right when Bruce was announced I got an email asking to panel a session, I believe Adam did as well. In general the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics which has a long co-history with the Southern Economic Association meetings had its largest attendance in quiet sometime this year and like Adam was mentioning, that influence seemed to trickle out beyond merely the panels that were delineated for the SDAE and into the conventional core of the southern panels as well.
AM: And this year’s plenary sessions featured two people that we are going to be familiar Bill Easterly and Timur Kuran Ann because of Bruce’s particular network we got some very classical liberal friendly presentations in the plenary this year which was lot of fun.
JH: What were your favorite panels or maybe some interesting new research you came across?
DD: Definitely my favorite panel of the Southerns more generally was the one involving philosophers John Hasnas’ panels on the role of economics and ethics. It included Steve Horwitz, Mario Rizzo, John Hasnas himself and David Schmidtz basically discussing the difference between consequentialism and deontological reasoning. The quote was that “economics can inform ethics to the extent that consequences matter.” So the remainder of the discussion seemed to center around well, how much do consequences matter in these broader public policy relevant discussions and so on and so forth. From the SDAE my favorite panel was the Carl Menger Essay Contest winners. Undergraduates submitted essays for this contest that was sponsored by a number of recently minted PhDs from George Mason to promote and instill this sort of Menger research project amongst upcoming academics. Paper presentations from Liya…
AM: Liya Palagashvili, Andrew Marcum and Zachary Carceres.
DD: Most impressive.
AM: As well as Jeff Fong, who was the honorable mention.
DD: I sort of wish that I had half as much talent as an undergraduate as the students did this year.
JH: Lets take a break from the original question, I just want to go into this Menger essay a little bit more. So you mentioned some of the winners, how did their presentations go, what were they researching?
AM: Well Andrew Marcum, who is history and political science major from Duke. These are all recent graduates this year. We always open the contest to students that are current undergraduates and students that just graduated this past May. So this year it happened to be the case that all three of them were recent graduates. So Andrew just graduated from Duke in political science and history and his paper took a spontaneous order perspective analyzing the Chinese massacre in Los Angeles in 1871. So he applied a paper written by Virgil Storr and Nona Martin here at GMU about perverse emergent orders and they actually examined the Bay Street riot in their original paper. Andrew instead looks at this particular riot that happened in Los Angeles arguing that the standard theories of things like racism and the legal environment, those things mattered, but those things were sort of omnipresent and had to explain why the riot happened when it did and the way it did, you actually need something like the tools of Austrian spontaneous order theory, to explain why the conflagration happened when it did.
JH: And I should mention that both Dan and Adam are on the SDAE committee that awards the Menger essay.
AM: Yes we were not judges this year, but we both participated in helping to organize the contest and we had Liya Palagashvili who presented on informal institutions in Armenia arguing that the after-effects of socialism in Armenia damaged the culture to such an extent that things like western style property rights reforms failed to take hold. So that is a large part of why Armenia remains sort of in the economic doldrums is because they have an underlying culture that doesn’t support those formal property rights.
DD: I liked Liya’s paper the best on the margin of the potential for future research. She really has an opportunity to make a significant and unique contribution to the post or failed state literature which is very popular now. Then the third paper was by, I’m butchering all of their last names they are so complicated …
AM: It is Zachary Carceres from NYU.
DD: His level of theoretical mastery for an undergraduate was just unparalleled amongst the entrants. He had this really interesting narrative regarding availability bias and status quo bias and why it is so difficult for individuals to think creatively about alternative institutional arrangements that don’t involve conventional and traditional forms of government and instead promote spontaneous order approaches to civil society in organizing our social world.
AM: This sort of a project applying insights from both behavioral economics and Austrian economics to political economy. So normally we use the tools of behavioral economics to analyze markets and how markets diverge from sort of standard rational actor models that he wants to turn that around and apply to politics and show how, people have an irrational level of confidence in the state or in inability to imagine alternative forms of governance as a consequence of exactly the same behavioral biases that people normally talk about in markets. We should mention this year we don’t normally have the honorable mention out, but thanks to San Jose State Economics Department, Jeff Fong who got our honorable mention was able to come out and present his paper which was on an exchange perspective on politics used to address the Arab Spring and specifically the roles social media as facilitating exchanges and ideas being an important element that drove that process.
JH: Okay great and now ending that kind of side bar and going back to favorite panels or any interesting research that you saw all there?
AM: So my favorite panel with SDAE, other than the ones I have really liked the Hasnas ones that Dan mentioned, obviously as well as the Menger one, my favorite panel that I saw was a twenty five year retrospective on the Economics of Time and Ignorance which is a book published in 1986 by Mario Rizzo and Gerald O’Driscoll and this was chiming into the methodological debates that were going on in the 1980’s.
So the panel had a number of people commenting on the historical context that the book was written in, the reaction to the book afterwards as well as sort of what importance it has today for people doing research in the Austrian tradition. Virgil Storr pointed out a really strange thing which is that at the time this book was a huge rallying point for people interested in Austrian economics, it was the buzz everyone was talking about it. People thought it was huge, but if you go over the citation patterns in the past fifteen years it has more or less disappeared.
So if you look at something like that Handbook on contemporary Austrian economics that recently came out there are zero citations for the Economics of Time and Ignorance. Even though at that time people considered this as a huge book and so he was trying to puzzle through why that is the case. There was another presentation that covered the immediate historical context of the book which included the post Keynesian revolution so a large part of the book is trying to speak to the post Keynesians of the day as well as that sort of general methodological dissatisfaction and anguish that economists were going through in the early 1980s, that this book tried to situate Austrian economics in that overall conversation.
PM: I’ll simply comment on one of my favorite parts of pretty much every academic conference that I go to is the IHS reception. We had I think over a hundred and forty people that showed up and yet it ran the range from everyone that was undergrads up to some very distinguished faculty members and you know one of the great things about these types of receptions is one on one personal interaction that happens almost spontaneously, it’s what happens in the hallways and in our case we literally did spill out over into the hallway of the hotel from the room that we were reserved in, and it is mostly students, grad students prospective grad students interacting with faculty they would potentially collaborate on in the future.
DD: I’d echo the appreciation for the IHS reception and I think that is absolutely right that the bulk of the value from attending academic conferences goes on in the hallways in the sort of after dinners and so on and so forth, and again just like the attendance rates for SDAE and the panel sessions were generally was one of the largest and most crowded that I had ever attended and I as a member of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics executive board we were sort of trying to think critically about how we maintain this general momentum to communicate the vibrant and engaging research program that is going on at these sort of meetings ordinarily you think academic conference, why would I want to go to that? But, this conference and the southerns more generally every year, year after year it is definitely the place to be if you are interested in Austrian economics, if you are interested in free markets, if you are interested in classical liberalism and interdisciplinary perspectives. So if you missed out this year then you should definitely attend next year which will be hosted in New Orleans, Louisiana.
JH: Which is a fun place to visit too, so double benefit?
DD: So I hear.
JH: And speaking of things that go on outside of the panels, I heard attendance at the Society for Development of Austrian Economics, as you were calling the SDAE dinner, was twice what it usually is, why was that?
AM: That is correct. We normally have about eighty people at the SDAE dinner which is sort of a weird, almost family re-union every year for the people doing serious scholarship in Austrian economics and this year we had over twice as many people for a very good reason. Leonard Liggio, former President of IHS, received the SDAEs Lifetime Achievement Award. So we had people come out of the wood work from all the different classical liberal organizations in DC as well as well as a much higher attendance among academics to come to the conference to honor Liggio and honor Leonard’s contribution to scholarship.
DD: The title lifetime achievement award really doesn’t even come close to doing Leonard justice. It is almost as though he has lived two lifetimes of intellectual contribution, I mean even young scholars like myself and Adam have had the opportunity to both interact with Leonard and be beneficiaries of his kindness and mentoring and opportunity enhancement. I have received several invitations to attend conferences based on his nomination and his role as an intellectual leader in our movement just hasn’t stopped despite his retirement from traditional appointment or just simply being elderly, he is really a force of nature and well deserving of this award.
PM: I’ll simply point out that Leonard has a strong historical like the IHS. Not only was he our past president, he was their at the very beginning, he was essentially Baldy Harper’s assistant as a graduate student and was with the organization through all of its iterations, was one of the two main people responsible for bringing IHS to George Mason University and oversaw kind that of entire process of transition from the organization that we started out with to an organization today that deals with over a thousand students a year and summer seminars, has a mass of programs of fellowship and scholarly support for graduate students, so Leonard’s really been kind of the intellectual engine and also the physical engine that drove IHS from its beginning.
AM: And that connection with IHS it really came out strongly during the dinner, must have been mentioned seven or eight times in peoples comments, people introducing and giving remarks on the importance of Leonard’s work and how clear it was that IHS served as a focal point for so many of those connections, because the number of people in that room that Leonard helped is simply staggering, that he helped advance their careers, hooked them up with ideas that they otherwise wouldn’t have considered, with thinkers and with professional contacts that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. It was really just staggering how much he has given and how much you could see that just in the audience people that he personally helped.
JH: Switching topics, who is on our panel here?
DD: I was on a panel that was coordinated by Adam Martin
AM: And I was on a panel that was coordinated by Dan D’Amico.
DD: They were great panels too.
AM: We both did panels in sort of polycentric law back to back which worked out well, so I organized a panel called “order be on states” That was largely actually organized around one of Dan’s working paper/book proposals, where he gives a taxonomy of different types of stateless order.
DD: Admittedly both of these panels were incredibly incestuous as far as our own personal research interests are concerned. One of the threads of the George Mason Research program right now is it takes the method of case study approach very seriously where you investigate unconventional social environments where traditional forms of government are either absent or just simply don’t apply, whether that be in a underground economy or a geographically distant place, or historical strange circumstance and then you look critically about how social institutions emerge and function therein, and so conferences are just a really great opportunity to get lots of different people working on lots of these different case studies together and really trace out and connect dots between the patterns and similarities and differences of those case studies.
So we had scholars like Dan Smith talking about the multi-ethnolinguistic environment of medieval Spain, we had Nick Snow talking about violent constraints that emerge among soccer hooligan gangs in England as well as …
AM: …Simon Bilo talking about gypsies basically and how their social norms protect them from predation even though sort of all the governments in Europe have been out to stamp them out for thousands of years, how is it, that they maintain a culture that allows them to escape those prosecutions?
And then Claudia Williamson and I presented some research that we are working on sort of the history of statehood and this has very large data that covers human history from 1 AD to the present and whether states are present and arguing that in fact it shows the states tend to be a negative in terms of economic development.
DD: In our own defense in terms of using these panels to further our own research interests. It is that we are not the only ones who do that, admittedly the southerns as well as the association for private enterprise education has really served as a spawning ground for the very important research surrounding the economic freedom of the world index. So scholars like Josh Hall, Bob Lawson, and James Gwartney get the opportunity to sort of host and interact with scholars who use the index thereafter in their own publications and applications.
So one of the big topics that is being pushed right now is the role that economic freedom has upon women’s role in society, whether that be through formal democratic voting processes or entrepreneurship and wealth creation in the economy.
AM: I think this is actually really important point for young scholars of all stripes whether they are graduates students or young faculty is to organize panels around particular themes that your research touches on, and it has a number of advantages it put you into direct contact with people who are working on some other topics as you and it is much more likely to draw a crowd, right, because when you are looking to the conference program and you see that, oh look there is a panel on the economics of bumble bees, water and books or something, just three random paper shoved together that the conference organizer had to get on to the panel, you are less likely to go to something like that, whereas if there is a sort of cohesive set of papers that address the same topic you are going to get much higher attendance which not only is good for in terms of publicity for your work, it is good in terms of the feedback and helping you improve the work, so it is really important on multiple dimensions to actually seek out those opportunities to create and participate in these sort of themed panels at the conference and I think that is as far, as the panels go that is really the most interesting ones and that is where the action is.
DD: It is also confirming that the topics that what you are working on is important and interesting to other people. It helps you know that you are on the right track and it signals that to other people as well.
PM: I really go to the panels looking for collaboration, you know conferences are great, they are a line on your CV, but if that is all you are going for you are missing out on something. The purpose of going to conferences is to figure out what other people are doing in your research area, find ways that your research overlaps with them, potentially talk to them about projects and in the future. You may get a co-author paper out of that. You may have a future scholarly opportunities and be invited to other panels elsewhere just based on the people that you meet in the room.
DD: This is something that I think econ, economics conferences more generally and we are lucky as a classical liberal tradition to have such connection with like the free market economics movement because econ really gets this right compared to other social sciences. A lot of social sciences consider conference presentations this like luxurious, prestige and ideas are almost constrained in that sense. I mean if you present the same paper at multiple conferences, to me that says, oh you are trying to improve those ideas. You are getting more feedback on it, you are updating the draft of the paper and continuing to try to make it more convincing to various different audiences whereas some disciplines it is almost shunned if you present the same paper for multiple years, or there is only one or two major conferences in the discipline and they are sort of reserved only the most prestigious of publishers or scholars.
The Southern economic association and others like it are, it is an open and vibrantly interactive environment where scholars young and old interact their ideas, collaborate etc.
AM: It is really transition from being, here is presenting something that I have already done to an input into the people’s work and I think that is the real key thing is that if you are not coming away from a conference energized and with a new ideas of things to work on then you are doing it wrong, you should come back from a conference ready to work harder and more and be more excited about your discipline, and if instead it is just tax then you are going about it wrong and you need to find a way to make them more productive.
JH: Thank you gentleman for joining us to talk about the SEA conference.
PM: Thank you.
AM: Thank you
DA: Great to be here.
JH: And for more interviews with leading scholars visit KosmosOnline.org providing career advice and intellectual resources for academics and this is Jeanne Hoffman, signing off.