"Closing" an International Economic Education Conference in OZ

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In Australia, we learned it is common to ask one or more conference participants to summarize and assess the conference in final closing session. We found the experience of serving as closers strangely similar to what students are asked to do in providing an overall assessment of course or instructor at the end of semester. By that point, much has been covered and discussed, but inevitably there are also many issues that were not covered or at least not fully answered. At conference with many speakers and large, voluble audience, the range of topics, presentation styles, and discussion is naturally even more varied than in courses taught by one instructor. So how can meaningful evaluation of the overall program be offered? Again, like students who evaluate their courses and teachers, we decided not to worry much about these philosophical and measurement questions, and easily concluded that our overall evaluation of the conference was extremely positive. As well reflected by the sample of papers published here, the conference largely succeeded in addressing its two announced themes: (1) What do we teach? and (2) How do we teach it? (Which also means, of course, What should we teach? and How should we teach it?) Although most of the participants were from Australia, even for U.S. participants it was clearly worth the opportunity cost of travel to attend the three-day conference. Our comments provide more perspective on what we felt was emphasized, deemphasized, or missing at the conference. On the first theme of what we teach or should teach, the conference was long on microeconomics but short on macroeconomics, except for Chen's paper on economic development. That mainly reflects the selection of keynote speakers by the conference organizers and not any underlying sense that all is well and settled in macroeconomics. On the few occasions when someone did raise questions or voice opinions about macroeconomics, it was most often to suggest that things were even more unsettled-or as David Colander put it, a mess-in macroeconomics. Of course, that uniformity of sentiment probably also reflects, at least in part, the relative scarcity of macroeconomists on the program and in the audience. Even among microeconomists, however, there was considerable debate in some plenary and concurrent sessions on what microeconomics to teach. Bergstrom offered qualified support for teaching the competitive supply and demand model as one alternative explanation of experimental and real market outcomes. But Colander and some speakers in concurrent sessions were far more