President's Column

February 2025

I had the pleasure of welcoming a group of early career scholars and senior mentors to University of California, Davis in December for the 2024 Early Career Professional Workshop organized by the mentoring committee. I want to thank Zoë Plakias and the mentoring committee for their hard work and dedication to making sure that everyone feels included in the big tent that is AAEA. It was great to have folks here on campus in Davis. Returning smaller AAEA events to our campuses makes for more interesting and lively settings than our usual anonymous conference hotels. It was a great event and left me feeling like the future of the profession is in good hands.

Beyond offering practical advice and sharing personal experiences, much of the guidance that the senior mentors offered can be summed up in five words attributed to my erstwhile colleague Steve Polasky “Do good work. Be nice.” When all is said and done, this seems like a pretty good north star for most of us.

What does it mean to do good work? Everyone will come to their own understanding of what good work means, but for me the key to good work in our field was best put forward by noted Canadian Immigrant and agricultural economist John Kenneth Galbraith “And here, I like to think, is the defining feature of agricultural economics as a field of scholarly research and instruction. It is an alert, informed concern with problems and their solution,” Or paraphrasing noted Canadian philosopher Red Green, “If folks don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.” To me this means working on problems that matter to the folks paying our salaries. It may mean working on problems that folks don’t want the answers to. It also means doing the high quality research that takes time and may be out of scope for policymakers and consultants. In the eternal “quality vs. quantity” debate, I come down firmly on the side of quality. At the end of the day, most people will be known for their best papers, not for the number of papers they write.

The second part is about being nice. I think this is particularly important in difficult times. Academic careers are different from most jobs in that you may have an office next to the same person for 30 years. Beyond your own department, you will be interacting with a relatively small group of peers for most of your career. As you advance in your career, small interactions with younger colleagues can have a large impact on their wellbeing. Even if you don’t find it intrinsically important to “be nice,” there are real returns to doing so. When hiring, departments implicitly consider collegiality[1]. Further along in your career, opportunities can open up if you have a reputation for being easy to work with. So being nice is both the right thing to do, and can also be important for your career.

Tim Beatty
AAEA President