W&L Professor to Give Presidential Address at Economic Conference Art Goldsmith is completing his one-year term as president of the Southern Economic Association.

By Brian Laubscher
November 15, 2022

Art Goldsmith, Jackson T. Stephens Professor of Economics at Washington and Lee University, has been invited to deliver the presidential luncheon address at the 92nd annual Southern Economic Association (SEA) conference, which will be held on Nov. 19-21 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Goldsmith is wrapping up his one-year term as the SEA President after taking over the leadership position in Nov. 2021. His presidential address will be delivered on Sunday, Nov. 20 and is titled “The 4th Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work: Reasons to Worry and Policies to Consider.”

The talk will focus on the concerns held by Goldsmith and fellow W&L economics professor Jim Casey — based on research from economists, psychologists and sociologists — regarding the elimination of jobs due to technological changes brought on by the fourth industrial revolution. His presentation will also offer new ideas on how the economy can provide enough meaningful jobs for those displaced by technology and a novel perspective on ways to assist the technologically unemployed in acquiring the skills needed to fill these positions.

“Professor Casey and I are grateful for the multiple sources of support we received from W&L for our work on the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said Goldsmith. “It started with Professor Hooks (economics department chair) encouraging us to develop a first-year seminar on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the future of work and society. In addition, she set it up for us to team teach this seminar, which advanced our knowledge and led to insights for three academic papers. Those papers, which offer a new perspective on fiscal policy and the functioning of the labor market, were then facilitated by Lenfest support and funding for summer research assistants over multiple years.”

The SEA conference brings together over 2,000 attendees and offers more than 500 sessions, including upwards of 100 invited presidential sessions. The organization has hosted an annual meeting since 1928 and has published the Southern Economic Journal since 1933, which is the eighth-oldest American scholarly journal in economics.

Following the completion of his presidential term, Goldsmith will continue serve on the organization’s board of trustees for two more years as a past president and will chair the Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award Committee.

Goldsmith joined W&L’s Economics Department in 1990 and, in 1995, became the inaugural holder of the Jackson T. Stephens Chair. Before coming to W&L, Goldsmith was a member of the economics department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He has been a core faculty member in the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability at W&L since 2005. In recent years, he served on the editorial board of the Review of Black Political Economy and the Review of Behavioral Economics.

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