Why we launched this website
For several years now James Long (UW Political Science), Victor Menaldo (UW Political Science), and Rachel Heath (UW Economics) have been meeting every other Friday along with other UW faculty members, graduate students and undergrads (from across campus), and occasionally invited faculty from other universities. We do this under the auspices of the Forum on Political Economy, which was the brainchild of Richard Wesley, who also endowed it. Unfortunately, Dick passed away before he had the chance to participate in this unique experience. But we think he would have been happy to learn that we’ve enjoyed ourselves and have had several very sharp and interesting students move through the ranks. Several of them have gone on to publish papers they introduced at the Forum and that goes for faculty members as well. So we owe Dick a debt of gratitude.
We often wonder what he would think of so many of the unprecedented events that have happened before he left us, including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the multiple waves of protests that have swept the nation and the world. He definitely had views on issues that are at the heart of those events and would have had a lot to say. One thing we are quite sure of: Dick would have been interested in going deeper than the media has done when covering these stories; he would have probably been in favor of deploying the power and precision of sound theory, methods, and evidence. He would have perhaps advocated for combining the best of political science, economics, and public policy to understand what’s going on. And that’s what we have tried to do, to the best of our ability, since we started in 2015.
The COVID-19 pandemic knocked us down this academic year and we only met until the end of Winter Quarter, therefore truncating what had been perhaps the most rollicking good time we’ve had doing these seminars. Regrettably, we did not have the energy, technical chops, or bandwidth to move our proceedings to Zoom. However, out of crisis was born the brainstorming and energy that usually launches new endeavors and here you have it: we are trying to find new ways to honor Dick’s legacy by doing things a bit bigger, bolder, and brasher.
We are going to experiment with a blog, posting working papers, and, if Nicolas figures it out, a podcast. Most of all, we want to keep having fun exploring new topics and applying the magic of facts, logic, and evidence to thorny social, political, and economic problems. We might be mistaken, but we feel that those things are in short supply these days. As academics, this should come easy for us to do, but in times of high uncertainty and anxiety, it is sometimes hard to pull off, no matter how much access to data and cool methods you have.
Please join us in these adventures — or don’t, but don’t say later we did not warn you you’d be missing out on good times!
