ASSA, Not AEA In Denver?

Denver In Some Other Month

The proceedings of the recent American Economic Association annual conference are online. Preliminary versions of some of the papers are available for download.

I have trouble getting a sense of what mainstream economists are about from such a massive list. Doubtless I would find some of these papers of interest, despite the forbidding technical titles. I regret that downloads are not available for panel discussions (for example, "What's Wrong (and Right) with Economics? Implications of the Financial Crisis", "Lessons for Economics from the Great Recession", "Grand Challenges for Social Science...", "History, Crisis, Institutions and Economic Analysis", and "The Ethics of Professional Economic Practice"). (Actually, doing a search on the word "Panel" does cut down the list of titles to a manageable size that may give a feel to the direction of the profession.)

I also look in this list for economists of schools of thought and fields in which I'm interested. The Union of Radical Political Economics has only one session co-sponsored with the AEA. Steve Keen provides videos and download links. The History of Economics Society also has one co-sponsored session. As far as I can see, the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) and the International Association for Feminist Economics have no sessions. Brad DeLong's presentation is the only one with the word "Keynes" or "Keynesian" in the title. This sample should not lead one to conclude that heterodox economists were not represented in Denver, for they appear in the program of the Allied Social Science Associations. Explicitly identified heterodox economists just seem to be banished from the AEA, to the AEA's shame.