While a graduate student at Rice University, my study carrell was located adjacent to the economics section in the library. Occasionally, I would wander through the aisles looking for reading material, and one day I came upon copies of the Southern Economic Journal. Little did I know that a few years later, at the University of North Carolina, would begin my affiliation with the Journal which would last thirty years, twenty-eight of which I have served as Managing Editor. During that period roughly 14,000 manuscript submissions have passed over my desk, approximately 2,600 articles and communications have been published, together with about 3,000 book reviews, in 113 issues. Many changes have occurred during those 30 years, both external and internal to our discipline. The rapidity of change in our cultural, social, political, and economic institutions during that period is, perhaps, unprecedented in our history. Thirty years ago, we were in the grips of both a cold war and a Vietnam war, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and the babyboom generation was beginning to make its presence felt at colleges and universities. All of these would have profound effects on our institutions which continue through the present.' Thirty years ago the profession was less specialized, less fragmented, than today, and communication among economists in different fields was more common. The newly emerging specialized fields were Soviet Economics and Economic Development, reflecting the concerns of the times. Econometrics was beginning to become a standard part of graduate training, and mathematical economics maintained its distinction, until later, when practically all specialized fields became mathematized. Computational costs and data limitations constrained empirical research, but the IBM 360 mainframe was available to those of us who had a working knowledge of Fortran which facilitated the construction of our own data sets, file maintenance and statistical programs whenever useful canned programs were absent. We were all programmers then, in varying degrees. Later, expansion of national government policy from general and indirect macro stabilization policies towards more direct intervention at the micro level spawned a host of new fields of specialization, which became known as applied fields, such as regional and urban economics, health economics, environmental economics, population economics, energy economics, as well