New Zealand’s sexiest economist 2014: Nominations open

NOTE:  Nominations are now closed

Last year I learnt a very important lesson – I am not the only person that thinks that the study and application of economics is sexy.  The sexiest economist competition led to a lot of discussion, a deserved winner (don’t let me forget to pass on a trophy at some point), and two comments I heard repeatedly for the rest of the year:

1. Are you going to do this again next year so I can vote for X.
2. Where is this person Y I really wanted to vote for – specifically mentioning the lack of female contestants.

I had no intention of doing a 2014 version of this competition, but I’m also vulnerable to peer pressure, so here we go again!

However, things will be a bit different this time.  I am asking for your nominations for New Zealand’s sexiest (public facing) economist – you are allowed to nominate multiple economists.  Details are below the flap.

A ‘public facing’ economist is simply an economist who deals with the public in such a way that a sizable chunk of people will know who they are and how sexy their economics is – this is a broad definition, and people from a variety of government departments, banks, private organisations, and universities are all likely to sneak into it.  I will leave defining public facing up to you – I will not remove nominations.

If you want an example, the head economist of a large government department is an appropriate choice.  The intern at your firm over summer, who you thought was sort of cute, and also had spectacular economic intuition, is not an appropriate choice.

The 20 with the most nominations will then enter the voting round.  Attaching your favourite photo of the economist will count as an additional quarter nomination, which could be useful if they are 20th equal (the logic being if you give me an appropriate photo, I don’t have to look for one!).

If we don’t get 20 I will hold an emergency general meeting of TVHE to get additional nominations.  If we get more than 50 I will hold an emergency general meeting of TVHE to see if we can make use of this additional information in some way.

Nominations will be open until Thursday February the 13th (New Zealand time), and voting will begin on Friday February 14th (at 8am New Zealand time) – just in time for Valentine’s day!

You can nominate people in a number of ways:

• Comment with their name and organisation in this post.
• Email me at matt@tvhe.co.nz with your nomination.
• Tweet us your nomination here.
• Comment on Facebook here.
• Comment on the relevant post on Linkedin.
• Doing something to this Google+ page – I don’t know how this works.

Note:  So far I’m assuming this post means we have one nomination from the Productivity Commission for Paul Conway.

Sidenote:  Can we also keep this classy – last year you guys were awesomely impressive in the way you focused on the sexiness of the economics, without making things judgmental or objectifying the fine people involved.  If we can do that again it would be super.