9 May 2016 – An Ivy League professor said his flight was delayed because a fellow passenger thought the math equations he was writing might be a sign he was a terrorist. He said the woman sitting next to him passed a note to a flight attendant and the plane headed back to the gate. Guido Menzio, who is Italian and has curly, dark hair, said the pilot then asked for a word and he was questioned by an official:
“They tell me that the woman was concerned that I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper”.
He was treated respectfully throughout, he added. But, he said, he was concerned about a delay that a brief conversation or an Internet search could have resolved. “Not seeking additional information after reports of ‘suspicious activity’… is going to create a lot of problems, especially as xenophobic attitudes may be emerging.”
Oh, what were the equations? Menzio is a theoretical macroeconomist interested in the behavior of markets characterized by search, matching and informational frictions. Some of his recent research has been devoted to the analysis of cyclical and secular fluctuations in unemployment, vacancy and workers’ flows (e.g. inflation and unemployment in the long run) and his equations related to that work.