THE PAST LIES BEHIND

I add my belated welcome to this gathering of the Western Economic Association International. A friend of mine who did his doctoral work at the University of Washington has warned me that attending a matinee in Seattle in July means running the risk of missing the entire summer. But most of us do not live in beautiful Seattle, so we can now spend matinee-time indoors, happy in the awareness that we can then return to our homes to experience summer. We all reasonably expect a convention of an economics society to be a fun experience. Economists have long been notorious for being fun types. In our frenetic revelry and merriment here, presumably most of you have been, thus far, sleepless in Seattle. It is not my purpose to sedate you. Indeed, for many of us, few things can be more entertaining and stimulating than a survey of the history of the organization. Granted, not everyone shares such a preference. Lamentably, in this ahistorical, if not antihistorical, age, most economists under the age of 50 find any event prior to last Tuesday to be too antiquarian for consideration. Oddly, the undergraduate perspective may be a tad more patient and generous. A UCLA basketball star recently remarked that, "History is what happened before I was born - and who cares?" By that conception, the history of the Western Economic Association is, for me, very brief. Still, after 75 years of existence of the Association, a sense of rightness and propriety calls for a bit of historical review. I shall try to tell the truth and nothing but the truth - but I shall not, in my ten minutes, attempt to tell the whole truth. My original version ran to 20 minutes; but I then deleted every other word, which not only makes the report blessedly shorter, but makes it, in its incoherency, sound even more profound. And so return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. During World War II, 1942-1945 (the war I won single-handed), there were no conferences. So this meeting of 1997 is the seventy-second orgy of the outfit - although because of instances of incapacity, Gary Becker is our seventy-fifth president. (You can see that the story has its complications, and you will have to concentrate real hard in the written examination which follows.) It is to be expected that an organization, like an individual, will evolve and develop - for the better, we may hope - vet a life of 75 years. The Association has changed in various respects. At the beginning of the Western Economic Association, it was not the Western Economic Association: The original name was the Pacific Coast Economic Association. Its first conference was held in 1922, in Portland, Oregon, with Alfred C. Schmitt as the first president. (To suggest a bit of perspective, the American Economic Review - not to be confused with the Association of the same name - was inaugurated in 1911, and the Southern Economic Journal started in 1935.) It was not until 1951 that the state-certified title was changed to Western Economic Association. The official designation, issued by the California Secretary of State, pronounced that "the name, Western Economic Association, is not one which is likely to mislead the public...." The name may not mislead - although, in actuality, not all economists agree on just what economics is and should be - but the Secretary of State gave no assurance that no members of the Association would ever mislead the public. Apparently, the beginning of the era of the new name was a probationary period. Or it took 20 years for the group to adjust to its new name. At any rate, in 1971, officers of the Association filed with California Little Brother a Certificate of Amendment of the Articles of Incorporation, firmly establishing the name, Western Economic Association. It was at about this time - a time still remembered by the more decrepit among us - that the Association leadership quite deliberately expanded its effective geographic base. …