Royal Economic Society Issue no. 181 Newsletter April 2018 Spring forward... As so frequently happens, the Spring issue of this Correspondence Newsletter coincides with the Society’s Annual Letter from America p.3 Conference. A report on the Conference itself inevitably, therefore has to wait for the July issue. But some of April’s content, notably the Secretary- General’s Annual Report, emanates from the Features Conference and it is only by the heroic efforts of all concerned that copy meets the printer’s deadline. The challenge of algorithmic economics p.4 The Report is particularly interesting this year (and Secretary-General’s Annual Report p.7 needs to be read in conjunction with ‘RES office news’) for the account it gives of new , additional, Economic Journal, editors’ Annual Report p.11 appointments to the Society’s payroll. It describes Bennett Institute for Public Policy p.15 what is, in effect, the ‘professionalisation’ of the Society — or at least of its administration. Econometrics Journal, editor’s Annual Report p.16 Fortunately, as Sue Holloway showed in the Treasurer’s Annual Report the Society is in a finan- cial position which has been strong for some years Obituaries and likely to strengthen in the immediate future. Elizabeth Serson Johnson p.21 The Treasurer’s Report is another product of the Annual Conference. It has not traditionally been Anthony Brewer p.21 published in the Newsletter but it is an important and interesting document and one might argue that a version at least should appear in these pages, in Comment addition to the Society’s website. Views are invited. The depreciation of sterling That said, fitting it into the April issue might be a - from Giles Keating p.23 problem given the new practice, anticipated in our January issue, of moving the Reports from the edi- tors of our two principal journals from January to April. The effect is to make this issue ‘report- RES office news p. 24 heavy’, with a corresponding reduction in space for more spontaneous contributions. Fortunately, Angus’s Letter from America meets his usual Conference diary p. 25 excellent standard and we have two interesting pieces by Paul Ormerod and Giles Keating. All three give cause for thought in their different ways. Royal Economic Society Economic Royal THE ROYAL ECONOMIC SOCIETY • President: Professor Lord Nicholas Stern (LSE) • President-elect: Professor Rachel Griffith (University of Manchester and IFS) • Past-president: Professor Peter Neary (Oxford) • Secretary-General: Professor Denise Osborn (University of Manchester) • Second Secretary: Professor Robin Naylor (University of Warwick) For other members of the Executive Committee, go to the Society pages on the website where all those involved in the structure and governance of the Society are listed. 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Non-members may obtain copies at the following subscription rates: • UK £5.00 • Europe (outside UK) £6.50 For membership benefits, sub- • Non-Europe (by airmail) £8.00 scription fees and how to join the Society, see back Next issue No. 182 July 2018 cover or go to: Deadline for submissions 16 June 2018 www.res.org.uk Editor RES Office Prof Peter Howells, Chief Executive: Leighton Chipperfield Bristol Business School, Operations Manager: Marie-Luiza De Menezes UWE Bristol, RES Office, 2 Dean Trench Street, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY Westminster, London. SW1P 3HE Email: [email protected] [email protected] Tel: 020 3137 6301 Email: [email protected] Website: www.res.org.uk Designed by Sarum Editorial Services: www.sarum-editorial.co.uk www.res.org.uk/view/resNewsletter.html 2 Correspondence Letter from America — On blood, immigrants, and intellectuals Angus contrasts current attitudes in the USA towards intellectuals and immigrants with those of the founding fathers. MERICA CAN SEEM very strange to foreigners. the Nobel visit to the White House did not take place, When I first set foot in New Jersey with my fam- perhaps by mutual agreement, given that several laure- Aily in the summer of 1979, I somehow imagined ates were no keener to meet the President than was the that the place was infested with gangsters. Not from The President to meet them. And after all, what could Trump Sopranos, which then lay far in the future, but more like- possibly learn from Richard Thaler, who works, among ly from reading Tintin in America to my kids, or from other things, on self-control? versions of the Al Capone story in the Reader’s Digest that, as a child in Scotland, had badly scared me. We vis- One immigration measure on the table is the RAISE Act, ited a hamburger place — in those days hamburgers proposed in the Senate by Tom Cotton and David Perdue, were thought to be healthy, and compared with the and supported by President Trump. It aims to cut immi- British versions of the 70s, probably were — and as I gration by half, and would subject potential immigrants carried my tray to a table, there was a loud pop. I looked to a test to select only those whose skills are thought by up, and a man across the room had his hands over his the sponsors to benefit the country. The New York Times face, with gore oozing between his fingers. Just as I had published a version of the test, on which 30 points were supposed. needed to qualify. I scored 31, just scraping by. The deci- sive factor for me was not my Cambridge BA, which did Universities held in low repute not count, but my high income, which I should not have Today, America is probably more famous for the ram- had had I not been already in the US. Then I noticed a pant anti-intellectualism of its administration than for a footnote. A Nobel Prize counts 30 bonus points — elevat- relatively quiescent Mafia. We are terrorized more by ing me to 61 — but not just any Nobel Prize. It must be populists than by gangsters, and populists seem to hate in a STEM subject. Peace and literature are apparently immigrants and intellectuals in equal measure. President not useful in today’s United States. I was surprised only Trump is an ardent (and apparently genuine) mercan- that economics did count. Mercantilism, anyone? tilist, and if he had a science advisor — which he has not What would John Winthrop have thought? managed to get around to selecting — he or she would Yet there is another side. The Puritans who started the likely recommend leeches or alchemy. The tax bill Massachusetts Bay colony greatly valued learning, and passed in December not only redistributes from poor to founded Harvard within a few years of their arrival. rich, but also imposed a tax on university endowments, Richard Hofstadter in his history of anti-intellectualism and, in an early version, proposed to tax as salaries the in America quotes Moses Coit Tyler ‘Only six years after tuition relief that graduate students nominally receive as John Winthrop’s arrival in Salem harbor, the people of an accounting counterpart for the teaching they must do. Massachusetts took from their own treasury the fund Universities are generally unpopular, with 58 percent of from which to found a university; so that while the tree- Republicans saying that colleges and universities have a stumps were as yet scarcely weather-browned in their negative effect on the way things are going in the coun- earliest harvest fields, and before the nightly howl of the try. Only 28 percent of Democrats agree, but taken wolf had ceased from the outskirts of their villages, they together, the numbers are not encouraging. had made arrangements by which even in that wilderness Even the UK is suspect their young men could at once enter upon the study of Aristotle and Thucydides, of Horace and Tacitus and the Immigrants are seen even less favorably than intellectu- Hebrew Bible.’ Shortly thereafter, Oxford and als, especially if they come from Muslim majority or ter- Cambridge recognized Harvard’s degrees as equivalent ror prone countries. In 2015, one of my fellow Nobel to their own. Of course, Trump is no Puritan. Laureates was Aziz Ancar, who was born in Turkey, another, Bill Campbell, was born in Ireland.