Yesterday I heard a talk by Derek Lemoine, an economist at Arizona. The man took the academic economics paper presentation to a place I hadn't been before. He's charismatic, unfazed by the nitpickiness, and his slides are white (and neon green!)-on-black instead of black-on-white.
What I really liked was his logic. He spent 15 minutes giving us a play-by-play account of the weekend in April 2010 that led to the collapse of the Waxman-Markey Bill, which would've instituted cap-and-trade. It was full of pictures and newspaper clippings and the like. He told us why coal and natural gas futures markets should have reacted in such and such way, and we believed him.
Then he showed us his data on those markets, and it didn't look good. Everyone yelled about it for a bit, but Derek seemed prepared. He dodged, dipped, dived, ducked, and dodged. In the end what was left was his storytelling, and it convinced us.
If I signed up for this economics project to be an interpreter of the world instead of an exogeneity-hunter, then this was definitely a moment to remind me there's still hope left.
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