The ARIA Loop

INTRODUCTION I'm sure that previous ARIA Presidents felt as I do today-nervous as hell!-but also very honored and humbled to stand before you as president of this wonderful organization. And, since I live in Florida, I'm just grateful that apparently nobody has called for a recount! When Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, the story is he would walk some 17 miles each day, and that's how he would develop some of his incredible ideas. On a lesser scale, I've recently taken up running, and several of the thoughts I'll share with you today were ideas that came to me while jogging on the miles and miles of beautiful trails that cut through the forests in Tallahassee. I've titled this speech The ARIA Loop, and by that I mean, besides the local reference, that ARIA serves as a type of learning loop, whereby we all teach and learn from each other. Now, for those of you who don't care much about presidential speeches, for the next 20 minutes I've included lots of pictures of Illinois people and places! You might ask how I know that it's only 20 minutes-well, it's because unlike the normal paper presentations here, and unlike the classroom setting, you don't get to ask questions! As I thought about what might be good topics for this speech, I wondered about the backgrounds of the ARIA presidents over the years. To begin, consider that 28 different institutions have had at least one serving ARIA President. Figure 1 shows the universities that have had several ARIA presidents over the years. Now, as we have many economists here, and as this is an academic presentation, a natural question that I'm sure you are asking yourself (since you can't ask me!) is, "What is the Herfindahl Index?!" You'll be glad to know that it's only 211, so the concentration here is fairly low! Although ARIA began primarily as a U.S. organization, we now have a significant international component-roughly 1 /4 of ARIA's membership is from outside the United States, comprising 135 members from 29 countries. The countries with the largest ARIA membership are shown in Table 1. In their presidential speeches, Jerry Todd noted that ARIA is a diverse group, and Sandra Gustavson discussed ARIA's strength in diversity, and so our international growth is something that we should value and encourage. STUDY THE ARIA MEMBERSHIP In his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes discusses characteristics of the typical individual who obtains a PhD in Science. With that in mind, I thought you might like to learn more about ARIA members and each other's ideas on a few questions related to three primary areas: (1) Undergraduate experience, (2) Graduate experience, and (3) Some ARIA pearls of wisdom. So, as you know, I e-mailed each of you a brief survey, and the figures I'll share with you today are based on 140 responses. As you'll see from the responses, ARIA members have a lot to say, and so it's very appropriate that we're meeting here in the Windy City! For convenience, I'll just refer to the survey as the ARIA Loop Survey. It's noteworthy that the respondents make up over 60 percent of the members on the 2004 program. First, I would like to thank all of you who took the time to respond. And I hope you find the aggregated (and certainly confidential!) responses interesting. Clearly, the responses would have been different 10 years ago or would be different 10 years from now, but let's take a look at what ARIA members say at this point in time. As I read through your responses, I was reminded of how we not only teach in the classroom, but also in the seemingly little things that we do, in ways that we might not even notice, but that mean a great deal to others. I'll come back to this theme later. An appropriate quote that I like from Henry Adams is: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Since ARIA includes academics as well as non-academics, I think the word "teach" applies equally well in the academic setting as in the business world, where mentors play such important roles in the development of future leaders. …