As I've done the last couple years, I'm summarizing the year's activities and looking ahead to the next year, along with some general impressions and reflections. If you've read my occasional personal updates this year, you know it's been a strange year, with a very productive and exciting first half, followed by a lackluster halftime…

This was definitely a different ASSA experience than years past (2013 and 2012 reports here, natch). There were a lot more paper sessions and meetings, and less get-togethers with editors and discussions of book projects. There are reasons for both: I was program chair for the Association for Social Economics this year, so I attended even…

As I look ahead to 2014—which begins with the program I put together for the Association of Social Economics at the ASSA meetings, including an opening plenary featuring Martha Nussbaum, who I am honored to be introducing—I can't help but look back on the past year. (Having a birthday close to the end of the…

This month (and last) I've been quite busy with school matters, but there's also been plenty of time for other pursuits, such as… Work continues on The Illusion of Well-Being; I've struggled with the structure and presentation of the argument, but I made a breakthrough recently, and things seem to back on track. (Lesson learned:…

Well. I'm growing less and less comfortable with the idea of active self-promotion, especially when I seem to have less and less to promote. I'm tempted to abandon this experiment with timely "hey, look what I done did now" updates. Maybe I should make them shorter and more frequent when things come up to announce…

Whew. What a month July was. Most important, I finished the book that needed to be done by the end of the month—and one day early at that! Actually, I asked for and received an extra five days (until the first Monday in August), but it turned out that I didn't need them (or I…

I'm not a big fan of summer—give me January over June any day! That said, it was a productive if not particularly eventful June. I spent most of my time on a book that needs to finished by the end of July—and will be, thanks to a good June! (I'm still not ready to talk…

So much for monthly updates, ha. To make a long story short, for the last three months I've been spending most of my time working on a book and managing quite a bit of change at school—both of which I hope to talk about soon—as well as giving invited talks, which I enjoyed. Because of…

It hasn't been quite a month since my last update–slowly improving. 😉 At the college, February was dominated by personnel issues (promotion and tenure), while March promises to be all about departmental restructuring and meeting job candidates. Not having to teach this semester makes more time for writing, but it's difficult to get my mind away…