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My guess is that 100 per cent of participants in the 2020 Summit, including myself, didn’t really know what to make of it beforehand. My guess is that 70 per cent of participants in the 2020 Summit, including myself, didn’t know what to make of it during the summit weekend. My guess is that a large minority of participants in the 2020 Summit, including myself, still don’t really know what to make of it.
When the summit was announced, the first issue concerned how best to get yourself invited. I knew that as a slightly post-middle-aged pink male I did not have the best demographics, so I would have to try some cunning tricks. The direct approach seemed a little tacky (‘Hi Glyn, I was just in your office and wondered how the selections were going for the summit?’) but there was some potential to be had in that we were required to propose some referees, and I had agreed to play this role for four colleagues. Judicious use of refereeing language would ensure that I could free up three or four of these places for my application.
I planned a few highly supportive and subtly damning responses to the refereeing invitation. For example: ‘Professor A is a brilliant economic theorist and has extraordinary talents in the use of mathematical lemmas and differential equations that are bound to be useful to an informed policy discussion with laypeople and the media.’[2]