Thread by @JakeVigdor

Rank-and-file economists don't know it yet, but the next president-elect of the American Economic Association has been selected.

Or at least the only individual whose name will be printed on the ballot has been selected.

Here's the story, #econtwitter...

AEA by-laws charge a nominating committee with presenting 2+ candidates for president-elect to the Executive Committee no later than April 30th. The 2 committees then hold what resembles a papal conclave, trading the Sistine Chapel for a meeting room at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare.

In about a year, the minutes of that meeting will be published in the AER.

We can tell the meeting has happened thanks to this week's press release on association award recipients. Those decisions are made at the same meeting.
aeaweb.org/news/press-rel…

Up to 20 votes could be cast in the conclave.

This year, representatives of departments ranked in the @USNews top 25 (linked on the AEA website) were entitled to 16 of those votes.

Representatives of the hundreds of departments ranked outside the top 25 were entitled to zero.

In 1940, the leaders of the AEA weighed the merits of democratic leadership elections, and decided they were insufficient to justify the hurt feelings of the man (and they did mean man) who might suffer the indignity of standing for election and losing.

In the words of John Maurice Clark, past AEA president and son of John Bates Clark, "the presidency should be regarded, not as a political office, but as an honor conferred by the Association without public competition."

So competition is good, sayeth economists, except when that competition risks making a Great Economist feel as though he does not rank #1 in the hearts or minds of lesser economists.

I fundamentally disagree with John M. Clark. The presidency should not be awarded to the economist with the best CV, but rather as the prize in a competition of ideas for what will yield the brightest future for our profession.

As it is in our peer disciplines.

The key to the future of economics does not lie in the offices of tenured faculty jockeying over departmental bragging rights.

It lies on the campus of a less-selective college or university somewhere, where today a promising young student is choosing what to study.