Remembering Mike Denny

I can never look at a conference bag without thinking of Mike Denny.

For ten years, Mike was Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Economics Association. Of all the decisions he made during that time, none were so important as those that led to the elimination of conference bags.

When Mike took over the running of the Association, the CEA held its annual meetings in conjunction with the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. The meetings with Congress were generally unsatisfactory. They were held in smaller centres, so fewer people attended.  It was hard for the CEA to get the rooms and support it needed. The conference receptions provided inadequate quantities of food and drink. But for Mike the clincher was always "people are paying this big fee to the Congress, and what do they get? A useless conference bag."

Some were sceptical, but Mike was determined to prove that the CEA could hold a successful meeting on its own. He organized the first meetings himself.  There was food at the reception - lots of it. Registration fees went down. But, because all fees flowed directly to the Association, revenues went up. Best of all, the dread bags were gone. The conference was an overwhelming success.

It soon became obvious that the Denny recipe worked: hold the conference in a major centre, provide quality boozing and schmoozing opportunities, and people will come. They will happily pay registration fees, which can then be used to bring in keynote speakers, and build an even bigger and better conference next year. In fact, the Denny recipe worked so well, and the Association now has so much money, that it can afford to waste some on conference bags.

Often when I go to international conferences, I'll run into another Canadian, and someone will say "you Canadians, you all know each other." That doesn't just happen. It's a product of having a healthy and dynamic professional association. That, in turn, depends upon the individual efforts of a handful of volunteers. Yes, Mike published in all the best journals - AER, REStat, Econometrica. But his greatest gift to the profession was his vision for a strong and financially viable Canadian Economics Association, and his willingness to sacrifice his time and effort to make that vision a reality. That, and lots of drink tickets.

As Deirdre McCloskey once observed, economists have a way of describing people they approve of, "He's smart. And he's a nice guy, too." That's how Mike's friends will remember him. Sitting outside the main conference building at the CEA meetings, chatting to anyone he knew - which seemed to be everybody. The pride he took in Judi's peonies. Stories of playing on the MIT hockey team. His belief in simplicity - and his willingness to fight for it.

Mike Denny passed away on December 27th, 2013 - the first Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Economics Association to have an asterisk placed beside his name. The family hopes to have a memorial in Mike and Judi's garden next spring.

Update: the Denny family has put together a really beautiful obituary here.

Comments

[Nick Rowe]

I'm sorry to hear that.

[Stephen Gordon]

Oh no, I didn't know. Mike was also a great teacher, and he was graduate director when I was doing my PhD. He contributed so much to U of T and to Canadian economics generally.

[David Andolfatto]

Me too. Nice post, Frances -- thank you.

[Steve Ambler]

A fitting tribute Frances. Thanks.

[Livio Di Matteo]

I'm sorry to hear this Frances. I met Mike Denny a number of times over the years and he was always very approachable.

[Jim Sentance]

I got to know Mike a bit when I was on the executive. Very down to earth guy. Thanks for this Frances.

[Jack Parkinson]

Mike was a great guy who was never afraid to share his opinion or help keep one motivated. This helped me to finish my degree. He will be missed by all who knew him.

[Frances Woolley]

Thanks for the comments, and for sharing your memories of Mike.

[Frances Woolley]

Now that I'm an academic administrator myself, I've been thinking a lot about the gradual disappearance of academics like Mike - guys who are serious scholars, are prepared to do administrative work, but refuse to get sucked into the world of petty bureaucratic rules. If he thought a rule was stupid, he just didn't comply with it. At one point I saw some disadvantages to that approach; now I'm starting to see more of the advantages.

[Linda Welling]

Sad to read this; thanks for posting, Fran. I knew Mike only through the CEA executive and conferences, but always liked him.

[westslope]

Nice post. Once upon a time I read a lot of Denny's and econometrics articles. Solid stuff (measured by how many times I re-read the article. :-) )

Think I met him once. Wore ill-fitting, worn blue jeans if I recall.

[Stephen Law]

Of all the people who shaped my understanding of economics and being an economist, the one to whom I would most directly trace my lineage as an academic economist is Mike Denny. Plus, he was indeed a great guy. And I have always liked his way of being his own person.

Mike deserves the credit for seeing me to completing my dissertation. I spent hours in Mike’s office, trying to understand how to turn the ideas in my head into research papers. His comments were always concise and focused. What is the question? What do we learn from this regression? Time and again, when I was at risk of getting lost in the details of the data, he would bring the focus back. Years later, I try to perform the same function for some of my undergraduate students. I told one student (now an assistant professor) that my job was to remind him of the forest when he got lost in the trees. Sometimes he claimed he felt he was looking at the leaves. I learned how to supervise students from being supervised by Mike. One of the great things about Mike is that he was very patient with PhD students. He did not ignore but he did not react to the emotional state of a panicky or freaked-out student. He just calmly returned attention to the work each time.

After I graduated, Mike and I continued to meet every now and again at conferences. Mike always offered up interesting reflections on the world of Economics – the job market, students, university administrations and so on – that were short ("economical"), by turns witty or pungent, but always pragmatically hopeful. For many years I have been thinking of him from time to time at my work, studying productivity growth in regulated industries, and at home, as I walk among our gardens looking at the peonies we grow. Mike left a very individual indelible mark on the world and, like many others, I will be thinking about what he wrote and what he said for a long time to come. Smart. And a nice guy.

Frances, thanks for your reflections and for providing another place for us to share ours.

[John]

Interesting perspectives on Mike Denny.

As an undergraduate his third year Micro was intensely frustrating. He seemed unable to organize his thoughts or explain the concepts (textbook was Deaton and Muelbauer). A lot of people turned away from economics after that and went on to be lawyers, MBAs etc.

So the moral of the story is someone can be a great colleague and an influential figure in his field (organizationally or in other ways) without being a great teacher.

It's nice to have that perspective on Professor Denny because like many of my generation at U of T, my experience of him was unhappy.

John Munro, the economic historian, has also recently died. He was a great and inspiring teacher, as well as a fantastic scholar, widely respected in his field (monetary and textile history in late medieval low countries and England).