Paul Kedrosky has observed that a statistical analysis (word cloud) of the American Economic Association session titles, or even of the papers, leads to the impression that the economics profession has been relatively uninterested in the ongoing financial and economic crisis. Unfortunately, this observation misses ignores the fact that session proposals are submitted a full eleven months ahead of the ASSA meetings. Think back to January 2008, and the terms ascribed to those who warned of a severe slowdown ("alarmist", etc.), and the whole discussion is cast in a different light.

Furthermore, the correlation between scheduled paper titles and actual is, shall we say, fairly loose. In any case, the main messages of the papers are usually discussed in the context of current events.

I'll illustrate this last point by discussing the only complete session I made it to (most of my time was spend interviewing job candidates): "The