Sunday, April 12, 2009
Venice
My paper was accepted for the Venice meeting. But as I mentioned, I can't use project funding for the trip. Registration would be E450 and the hotel E230. Flying on Ryanair from London would be just £10. The train from Brighton to Stansted airport would cost much more than that! So I estimate a total Australian Dollar cost of about $A1,300. My marginal tax rate is 16.5% so after tax we're looking at about $A1,100. Originally, when I submitted to the conference I didn't know whether Snork Maiden would get accepted for the course in England. But now she can't come with me to Venice and I was there before anyway (1998). So I expect I'm going to have to withdraw my paper. I'll state the reason of course, just in case they have some funds to help out... The Amsterdam meeting is a similar cost and the same story pretty much if they don't agree to swap my papers.
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4 comments:
It's funny how the marginal value of such a trip isn't enough for you to want to pay for it yourself, but you'd still go if it was free (to you) but be costing the same amount to your project sponsor. In these days of email and video conferencing, physically sending academics around to he world to 'conferences' doesn't seem good value for money, especially if it's tax-payer funded.
My willingness to pay for the conference is constrained by my ability to pay and there is no reason that my WTP and the sponsor's WTP should be the same. That said I'm not a big fan of conferences and don't go to a lot. The main value in them is generally though what wouldn't be communicated through watching a video of the conference - i.e. meeting new people who can develop new collaborations, discuss new ideas etc. My impression is that the Australian government sees value in this being in such a relatively isolated location. The job I interviewed for here (but didn't get) allocated far far more money to travel/conferences than my previous US job which nominally had a higher salary at current exchange rates.
It still seems a bit anachronistic to spend 23 hours (each way!) sitting on an aeroplane to fly to Europe for a few hours of physical networking with collegues. With unis having T1 internet access you'd expect academics to be better at using twitter to see who's currently online that is a potential collaborator, and using academic versions of facebook, video chat etc. to do 'networking'. After all, many academics are now involved with distance education and regularly do these sort of online get-to-know-you sessions and tutorials, online discussion etc. with their students.
Certainly it's less important than it was once to go to conferences. Especially in economics where there is a strong culture of online working papers. But if all this was so easy to do virtually, business travel in general would have died out, which it hasn't.
Distance education can work for more commodity type education. There claim to be distance education PhDs but none from good programs... Here to physical location is still important to absorb the culture apparently.
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