Pai-Ling's Short Visit

June 20th, 2018

Last weekend, after the visits of Clara and Claudia and of Annette and before the arrival of Anna and Caroline the past couple of days, we were so happy to share dinner here in Paris with a good friend Pai-Ling Yin.  The number of connections that Pai-Ling and I have is a little eerie.  And perhaps our shared experiences add to the enjoyment I always have when I'm with her.  

I first met Pai-Ling when the two of us were both (relatively) young faculty members in Boston.  She taught at Harvard Business School and I at MIT, but we crossed paths often because our research interests overlapped---we both studied digitization and the economic effects of the internet.  It didn't take long for us to figure out that we had something else in common:  we grew up about five miles away from each other in suburban Indianapolis.  We attended rival high schools, she at North Central and I at Lawrence Central.  (The story would be a bit cooler if we had been in high school at the same time, but, in fact, she is several years younger than I am.)  I went on to attend Purdue as an undergraduate, and she went to Indiana University, also rivals.  Afterwards, I traveled to England for my masters degree at Cambridge University.  Pai-Ling did hers at the London School of Economics.  We both returned to the US for our PhDs, me at MIT, Pai-Ling at Stanford.  (I guess you could describe Cambridge/LSE and MIT/Stanford to be yet two more pairs of rival institutions, if not in the sports arena, at least academically.)  

A few years ago, she left the Boston area and is now on the faculty at USC.   

In a refutation of the laws of plane geometry, Pai-Ling and I have had remarkably parallel careers, yet ones that seem to intersect in many different places at many different times.  We seem to often end up at conferences together, or temporarily in the same city for some reason.  I love chatting with her about our beloved dogs, commiserating about career issues, comparing notes on recent visits to Indiana, etc.  The proximate cause of her Paris visit is that, happily, she was assigned as the discussant on my paper for my recent presentation in Munich.  The paper is about how the internet is changing the geographic distribution of skills, so I used that as a hook to introduce her at the end of my talk.  "We grew up five miles apart from each other in suburban Indianapolis, but it took the internet, in particular the study of it, to bring us together as presenter and discussant half a world away in Munich, Germany."  At the end of the conference, she said that she would be in Paris in a couple of weeks working with coauthors and would love to meet for dinner.  Yes, of course, I would, too.  

We took her on a walk around our neighborhood, with Sandy, going to the dog-friendly parts of the Luxembourg Gardens.  We snaked our way through the northern part of the sixth, past Saint Sulpice and the Marché Saint Germain.  We talked about the history of Saint Sulpice and how it is now mostly famous because of its organ concerts and its connection with The DaVinci Code. We walked through some of the narrow streets north of Boulevard Saint Germain, settling at Le Christine for a lovely dinner.  Afterwards, we walked through Cour du Commerce Saint André, talked a bit about the important events occurring there around the revolution, and ended at Odéon.  (One of the best parts of living in Paris is having the opportunity to host so many friends from all over.  We feel like this neighborhood is ours and love to show it off to visitors, taking them to our favorite spots and teaching them all about it.)  

Pai-Ling is on her way back to California now, but I look forward to the next time we intersect, whether it be Boston, Indianapolis, Munich, Paris, California, or elsewhere.