LONG POST
This post is for anyone concerned about the American Economic
Association's unilateral cuts imposed on sessions organized by heterodox
economics groups for January 1999 and beyond. The AEA's top-down,
non-democratic action threatens the intellectual community of heterodox
economics and needs to be challenged.
Summary of the FACT SHEET below:
The Union for Radical Political Economics finds
- the cuts are unnecessary
-the cuts were arrived at in a totally undemocratic manner
-the cuts are grossly inequitable
URPE at ASSA coordinator Al Campbell, with support of the URPE Steering
Committee, wrote a response to John Siegfried to ask for access to the
data and to request that no sessions be cut.
Your voice is needed, too.
The URPE steering committee asks every individual concerned about this
to write/fax/email/call the members of the AEA Executive Committee. The
AEA Executive Committee nembers' names and contact information will
follow in another e-mail.
Susan Fleck
for the URPE Steering Committee
Susan Fleck
w:(202) 606-5654 x415
h:(301) 270-1486
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
**********************************
My personal opinions do not necessarily reflect those of my employer and
my postings can not be attributed to my employer.
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FACT SHEET ON THE CUTS IMPOSED ON THE UNION FOR RADICAL POLITICAL
ECONOMICS, prepared by Al Campbell, URPE at ASSA coordinator, University
of Utah
1) John Siegfried, who has the title of "ASSA
Administrator," (and who is the new Secretary of the AEA)
wrote a letter to URPE dated January 22, 1998, in which he
notified URPE that the number of session that URPE will be
allowed to organize at future ASSA meetings is being cut from
32 to 18 next year and 9 all subsequent years. URPE has had 32
sessions without change since 1969.
2) Although the project to effect the cuts went on for at
least two years (what Siegfried called the primary data was
collected in San Francisco in January 1996), URPE was not
consulted or even informed of this lengthy process or the
intended cuts. The whole process was completely undemocratic,
in regards to the "allied" member organizations of the Allied
Social Sciences Association.
3) The letter indicated that the "primary (but not
exclusive)" basis for the new allocation was the results of
surveys of registrants taken at the 1996 meetings in San
Francisco. Registrants were asked at the bottom of the
registration form to indicate each of the organizations to which
they belonged. URPE showed 118 registrants.
It should be noted in respect to this declared primary
statistic, there are several bases for extensive bias. One is that
URPE is a largely East Coast organization: our attendance
would be much smaller at San Francisco, New Orleans, or even
Chicago meetings (those of the last 3 years) than say the New
York or Boston meetings coming up. A second basis for bias is
that people do not necessarily fill out this part of their
registration form: some from oversight, some from seeing no
reason to, and some from a concern that identifying oneself as a
member of URPE to any mainstream organization like the AEA
could negatively impact their career opportunities and
development in the future. Had we been involved in the process
we could have provided a list of URPE member who were in
attendance (at least those that were willing to be so identified to
the AEA), which the ASSA could have checked against their
attendance list. But again, we were not consulted or even
notified of this several year long project.
4) Mr Siegfried's letter was not crystal clear on the reason
for the overall cuts. It suggested two reasons.
First, he argued "The proliferation of sessions dilutes the
quality of the program as well as the average attendance at
individual sessions. Some are so low as to be embarrassing for
the organizers." It is not Mr. Siegfried's role, or the role of the
ASSA or AEA, to decide what is "embarrassing" for us- we are
actually capable of deciding that without his insights. The issue
of quality is very tricky to evaluate, and again we think we are
better able to decide on quality for our sessions than Mr
Siegfried or the ASSA/AEA. There is a widespread opinion of
economists, not only outside of academia but also in other fields
like sociology and political science, that they do statistically
intricate work that has little relevance to issues in the real world.
There is a serious question of how many people in the AEA
carefully read the AER, and it certainly is seldom read carefully
(other than to pull out quotes to support pre conceived
positions) by academics outside economics or people outside
academia. We understand that the AEA does not find the bulk
of the work done by people operating outside the neoclassical
paradigm to be what Mr Siegfried would call "quality" work,
but most economists operating outside the neoclassical paradigm
do not find much (not all) of the work presented at the AEA
components of the meetings to be "quality" work either.
Obviously, we and not Mr Siegfried should be the judges of
what we consider quality work in our sessions.
Mr Siegfried implies a second reason for cutting the
number of sessions. "In addition, the large number of sessions
excludes some potential convention sites that do not have
sufficient room space to accommodate us." In itself it is not
clear why this is a problem. In his response to the AFEE
complaint about the cuts they received, he elaborates further.
"Our primary criterion for site selection is low hotel rates
because many participants, and particularly younger ones, pay
their own hotel bills. The hotel rates for those members who do
get onto the limited number of sessions are lower if we can get
bids from more than one city." Of course, in the letter to URPE
he said that there were still a few cities that could accommodate
us- under Bertrand Oligopoly pricing models two is enough to
get the competitive price, so suddenly shrinking it to one in his
letter to the AFEE is deceitful when in fact there is still more
than one site we can go to. But the deeper issue is that there has
been no attempt by the ASSA/AEA to find out what the trade off
of our ability to carry out our academic goal is in terms of what
higher hotel room rates we would be willing to pay- it has all
again been decided by Mr Siegfried with no input from the
organizations that are severely impacted. Even without a poll I
can certainly say: members of URPE would be willing to see
rates go up from $80 to $100 per night (which is actually a small
percentage increase of total costs for attending the meetings, by
the way, as would be any imaginable room rate increase) to see
their sessions maintained so they can carry out their academic
mission which is the reason they go to the meetings in the first
place.
5) Mr Siegfried indicated that the ASSA meetings have
grown from 355 sessions in 1985 to 455 sessions in 1988 to 549
sessions in 1998. Note first that the rapid increase came in the
mid 1980s, not now. Further, convention capacity in the US has
increased dramatically (and particularly the ability to host large
conventions) over the last decade. Given this, it is difficult to
believe that such a small percent increase in sessions over a
decade, 20.7%, could cause a crisis. But his figures make the
crisis story even harder to accept- he goes on to say that
attendance has increased only 3% over a decade! We can see no
need for cuts in anything given these figures.
6) Mr Siegfried indicated that the ASSA intended to cut
sessions by 10% this year and a further 10% the following year.
That would be a cut of 55 this year to 494, and a further cut of
49 the following year. URPE, which did not contribute at all to
the growth of sessions that Mr Siegfried is concerned with (it
has had 32 sessions since 1969) has been slated for a cut of 14
session. That is a 43.8% cut this year compared to the projected
average of 10%. In addition, URPE alone is being asked to
provide 25.5% of the total cuts this year, despite having only
5.8% of the sessions in 1998, and as noted, not having
contributed at all to the growth of sessions that is held forth as
the problem. The cuts are extremely inequitable.
7) Mr. Siegfried puts forward that attendance at URPE
sessions averaged 13 at the Chicago meetings, while the average
session attendance across all groups was 32, the AEA averaged
49, and the high group, the AFA, averaged 68. Our first
concern is that we have not had access to the data this is drawn
from, or any indication of how it was gathered, and we have
asked Mr Siegfried for access to all the statistics they have been
compiling for at least 2 years. But our concern with this point
goes beyond that. We need a certain number of slots to be able
to carry out our academic mission. The AEA can decide how
many slots it wants to organize to carry out what it sees as its
mission, and what it wants its average attendance to be, we will
not try to impose our ideas on them of how they should try to
carry out their mission. Given that we do not accept that cuts
were necessary at all, and given that we believe the convention
could continue to be run at the level it is at, the differences in
attendance levels is irrelevant. We want the same 32 slots we
have always had, so we can carry out our academic work- the
ratios between groups would only be of any importance if there
was a need to go to a smaller convention and decide how to
allocate a lesser number of slots. Even if that were true we
would argue that the issue of the need for diversity in a field
overwhelmingly dominated by one paradigm (and one we argue
does not do well at explaining the real economic world) would
be a second factor to be considered along with the attendance
numbers, and so the ratios would still not be determinant by
themselves- but since we have not seen evidence yet of the need
for cuts at all (certainly the 3% attendance increase over a
decade does not make that case), we dismiss the offered data on
relative attendance levels as irrelevant to the number of slots a
group can have.
