Three questions to Malcolm Rutherford

Malcolm Rutherford is Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the world wide, universe wide, authority on the history of American Institutionalism. He is also one of my favorite historians of anything as he writes rigorous and engaging, archive based social history of ideas. (lots of attributes) I emailed him three questions.

1. Why is the history of American institutional economics interesting?
It is interesting for several reasons. It was (is) the most substantial and longest lasting non “orthodox” tradition in American economics. In terms of American academic economics, much more substantial than Marxism or historicism. Apart from its own intrinsic interest in its attempt to explicitly incorporate institutions in economics, it is interesting because: 1) its history tells us a vast amount about the way in which academic economics has evolved and changed in the US.; and 2) because its relative decline in the post World War II period tells us a lot about how and why neoclassical economics rose to ascendency.

2. What is the thing that scholars in HET get most wrong about the history of institutional economics?
A couple of things. Institutionalism is still over-identified with Veblen and with his attempt to build an evolutionary theory. Institutionalists such as Hoxie and Mitchell gave up on that aspect of Veblen’s thinking fairly quickly. What institutionalism as a movement was really about was an empirical view of science and the ideal of “social control.” When you look at the institutionalist literature in detail the rhetoric of “science” and “social control” is overwhelming. Science, for institutionalists, meant a critical investigation of the actual functioning of economic institutions. Social control meant finding methods to control economic activity to supplement the market. These methods could involve government regulation or planning, but could also involve novel forms of enterprise with different structures of incentives from the usual corporate form. Perhaps because of the over-identification with Veblen, it is still not properly appreciated just how “mainstream” institutional economics was in the 1920s and 30s, but institutionalists such as Mitchell and J. M. Clark were entirely a part of the establishment of economics.

3. What insights can we expect from your own and from others’ research in the near future?
Well, I can’t really speak for others, but I am working on a book that will pull together the past 12 or so years of my research on the institutionalist movement. It will be called “Science and Social Control: The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1945. Look for it at Amazon sometime next year!!

Distance learning since 1858

So in a fit of successful marketing I was sent this visualisation of the history of distance university education and thought I would share it with you. It came from a website offering help to find on-line courses, so fair enough – I’m not advertising, simply citing sources. And it’s interesting, not just because I was talking about visualisations becoming the new ‘thing’ in economics elsewhere, but it’s something we are slowly seeing in a few sessions at the HES conference, and now here’s one on history – even if it is a very specific bit of history. Turns out the University of London was first to offer distance learning back in 1858, and by 2005 over 2 million students took at least one course entirely on-line. The world is moving fast it seems. Click the image for a bigger size, and have a look at the time-line at the bottom which is particularly nice.

Anyone fancy a go at visualising some other aspects of the history of thought?

Experiencing the Shock Doctrine

Thanks to some friends journalists, I got an invitation for a press projection of The Shock Doctrine, a movie by British directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross based on Naomi Klein’s much discussed bestseller, which will be released on March 3 in France. For 82 minutes – it does not seem very long but, believe me, it is – I have been exposed to unbearable images: the massacres in Chile and Argentina, the bombing of the Russian Duma, the collapse of the Twin towers, the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, tsunamis and hurricanes, dead bodies in the streets of New Orleans, Milton Friedman being held responsible for all these horrors. The images are so violent, indeed, that I could not keep myself from thinking that the directors were themselves nurturing some kind of fascination for it and were trying to apply the Shock Doctrine to the spectator – that poor little me huddled up by fear and anxiety in his red velvet seat. Are you more virtuous than your opponent when you end up using the tools you are denouncing? Then, came to mind this sentence by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (roughly translated by yours truly): “We are not responsible for the victims but in front of the victims. And there is no other way than imitating an animal (growling, digging, giggling, convulsing) to escape the scurvy. Thought itself is sometimes closer to a dying animal than a living man, even a democrat.”

Too school for cool

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

from Econstories.tv

Experiencing Russ Roberts‘ latest media venture is only comparable to watching the Office. It makes me want to crawl into a dark, noiseless place. The difference is that after the TV series, I am always comforted knowing that it is fiction and meant in jest. I don’t get the same feeling after “The Hip Hop Macro Anthem” (letting slip an analysis of the title). In the Office, Ricky Gervais’s David Brent thinks he is smart, attractive, and popular, but because every attempt at getting recognition from his peers fails, because his words and actions are always followed by awkward silence, he and we known that he is none of those things. Does Russ Roberts’ know this isn’t smart, or attractive or popular?

Paul Solman of PBS has covered the topic, but I don’t think he finds it cool either…

updated 27th January 2010…

Did the economists miss the cognitive revolution?

I am currently reading a fascinating book, “The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology” by Bernard J. Baars (1986).

With a long introduction, it provides informative material for an outsider like me on how the cognitive turn played out in psychology, and presents a clear historical background getting back to Wundt and the early experimentalists, and the origins of the behaviorist revolution. Then it is followed by a series of interviews of participants in the cognitive revolution: from the opponents (Skinner and others) to the enthusiasts, and the followers.

Baars (1986)

On the substance, I was stroke by how much behaviorism, which is the methodological orthodoxy that was overthrown by cognitive psychology, shares features with today’s textbook economics. Both share the status of a well-guarded orthodoxy: in their interviews, psychologists remember that behaviorism in psychology was exclusive, displaying a “nothing but” attitude: variables should be related to nothing but observable behavior, which disqualified the discussion of concepts like “memory” or “representations” ! Those words were taboo in psychology at least until the mid-1950s.  Looking back, psychologists consider that the methodological rigorousness of behaviorism, which insisted that each concept be operationally defined and testable, had the effect to strip psychology from its substance: the study of cognition, consciousness,  emotions and rational behavior were discouraged, virtually banned indeed, because these concepts did not readily translate into tightly defined behavioral variables that could be observed in an experimental setting.

I could not help but be reminded of a similar taboo in today’s economics, where the formation of preferences, or how the process of choice unfolds, is declared “out of bound” right from the introductory chapters in microeconomic textbooks: only an individual’s observable behavior, as it is instantiated in the outcome of the choice it performs, is to be taken into account.

The cognitive revolution in psychology crystallized around the mid-1950s, early 1960s. Forty years later, nothing of that sort happened in economics, it seems to me. With behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, maybe that economics will jump directly to the next train: the neurocognitive turn. Or will it miss that one also?

Post-script: on an approaching topic, Wade Hands has a paper forthcoming in the CJE, which is a nice read.

HET vs. SSK etc. etc… It’s (very) old hat

Maybe I am slow or we have just collectively ignored the fact that the debates we keep having about internalist vs. externalist history, SSK vs Traditional History of Economics, Context vs theory-focus, was resolved many many years ago. Maybe no-one bothered telling us? At least that’s what I get from the third edition (!) of a rather excellent book on The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (2008: 7):

The discipline of the history of science used to be riven by warfare between internalists and externalists (c. 1930-59). The internalists were supposed to have believed that science, or possibly an individual sub-discipline within science, was a system of thought which was self-contained, self-regulating, and developed in accordance with its own internal logic. The externalist, on the other hand, was supposed to believe that the development of science was determined by the sociopolitical or socioeconomic context from which it emerged. In fact, neither position seems to have been properly established as valid or viable (Shapin 1992: 345-51), and it wasn’t long before a professed eclectic approach became all the rage (c. 1960). Effectively, this eclectic approach is still dominant.

I am happy to plead ignorance on this one, but having heard this sort of debate at many a conference, across several blogs (ours is no exception, even if this memorable debate was not explicitly about externalists vs. internalists), I get the feeling it isn’t just me. At some level I wish I had had John Henry’s book a few years ago, but better late than never. Also, I’d recommend it as a good introductory read – it’s 179 pages is not strictly correct, as only 114 are content (the glossary – especially his definition of ‘whiggism’ – and references are excellent too), and it is a ’small’ book, A5 size. Worth getting, now if only I was still going to teach that course this semester. Dammit.

Paul Samuelson Memorial @ AEA 2010

Paul Samuelson (from Nobelprize.org)

There was a memorial session to Paul Samuelson that was added to the program of the ASSA/AEA meetings in Atlanta. The session was presided by Robert Hall (Stanford University) and had as speakers: Robert Solow (MIT), Peter Diamond (MIT), Avinash Dixit (Princeton University), Robert Merton (Harvard University) and James Poterba (MIT). Both Kenneth Arrow and Stanley Fischer were invited but could not attend. Nonetheless they wrote some remarks that were read by Bob Hall at the session.

Solow was the first to speak and started by posing the following question: who was the most influential economist of the last 70 years? He then argued that this is an ambiguous question. If it refers to the world of politics, newspapers and media, the answer would be Keynes, Friedman, among others, and Paul Krugman in the future. If the question refers to how economics operates and what we do, the answer would undoubtedly be Paul Samuelson, he continued.

Solow then went on and talked about many sides of Samuelson, about his broad interest on economics (he was, to Solow and other panelists, the last generalist in economics), about his understanding that the role of economic theory is to make business journalism better, and other things. Two things are worth mentioning here. First, Solow argued that Samuelson abandoned several areas of economics because he saw them going in the wrong direction and becoming uninteresting. Solow took the opportunity to implicitly raising his criticisms to modern macro by observing that Samuelson abandoned macroeconomics for this reason. Second, Solow said that the Great Depression was really an experience that marked his and Samuelson’s life very much, and made them question the stability of a capitalist economy. This made them become, in Solow’s own words, “cafeteria Keynesians“: those who say “I’d have a little bit of this, and a little bit of that” and “No, thanks, not that”.

Peter Diamond reinforced the role played by Samuelson’s Foundations in his training as an economist, and also praised Samuelson’s overlapping-generations model. He mentioned that as a graduate student at MIT he had both micro and macro with Samuelson because in that year Solow (who usually taught macro) was away.

Other panelists talked about Samuelson’s outstanding intelligence and his habit of working hard, but also of playing tennis regularly in the afternoons, about the fact that he raised 6 children and about his unique habit of calling people and start talking about economic models and ideas without even asking either how the person was doing or if the time was appropriate. Samuelson was praised as a teacher (who was good at showing the subtleties of an issue but not very good in teaching the basic ideas), as someone who understood that mathematics was a powerful language, and as a giant on whose shoulders the current generation stand.

Relevant to historians, two of the panelists repeated two stories already known to some of us. The first was told by Dixit: that Samuelson liked telling stories about economists (like Smith, Marshall, Fisher, Keynes, Joan Robinson…) during his lectures and that he had a special affection for Frank Ramsey. Dixit said that in a class Samuelson told the students that Ramsey has learned German in a week, by reading Kant using a dictionary (with my apologies for self-promotion, details on this apparently false story can be found in my article on Ramsey published in HOPE). The second was by Poterba who mentioned that Samuelson had made a very important contribution to the theory of optimal taxation in a memorandum to the US Treasury in 1951, in which he explained and recast Ramsey’s result of 1927 and which was later published in the Journal of Public Economics (1986) as a historical document.

All in all, it was a very interesting session.

P.S.: AEA members ca watch this and other recorded sessions online at the AEA website. If you want to read Krugman on Samuelson, check his blog.

“We are not historians of economic thought”

Or so the Economic Journal emphasises to relax its readers’ otherwise shock and horror at their November 2009 issue. The feature issue honours James Meade (1907-1995) by drawing on a recent conference about him. The editors (Vines and Weale 2009: F423) immediately declare that “the contributors were asked to write papers on contemporary topics – this was not a history-of-economic-thought conference” ! Rest assured dear reader of the Economic Journal, we are not historians of economic thought, and this feature is not about the past.

But of course it has to be. The introduction will talk about Meade’s (or as the chummy editors repeat: “James’s”) contribution to economics through his efforts during and after the Second World War.  History is then reduced to talking about the development of “obvious” ideas (ibid: F425), and how it was  ”inevitably [that] the British work became better known” than US and Dutch work on national income definitions (ibid: F424).

So the editors take the Whiggish road to Meade’s work and quickly establish how “Keynes set out the policy necessary to avoid excess demand in wartime, in his famous book How to Pay for the War. In response to this, James wrote a note in which he set out the a double entry system for national accounts” (ibid: F424). In the world that Vines and Weale describe, Keynes published a book, Meade read it and he responded in 1940 by producing a framework for defining the national economy and its output. Simple. And consistent with the general story told of national income ideas in the 1940s. Simple and consistent. Albeit disputable.

It is at this point I’d wish the editors were historians or that they and other literature was proud to do historical work Vines and Weale argue it was  ”in response to [How to Pay for the War]” that Meade composed the national accounts. The context of the situation tells a different story. And some interest in the history of ideas and context might have avoided this whole notion.

Meade had been hired by Austin Robinson that spring of 1940. He fled Geneva with his family to come to London, and there took up work on the national accounts. Why? Because Robinson had hired him to come to the Treasury, sit down with Keynes’s book, and extrapolate the accounts presented by Keynes. Robinson had convinced the Treasury that such an endeavour could be useful for the war effort. Meade’s note was not an independent “response” to Keynes, it was a job he was hired to do. It would only be successful after he was joined by Richard Stone and then pushed, encouraged and edited by Keynes in the Treasury first, and then in the US. Our definition of economic growth as GNP growth was far from inevitable.

Meade was not the maverick that a context-less reading of the facts may suggest. He was hired to do something, something he himself had shown little inclination to do previously. Meade supervised the League of Nations national income data before fleeing across France, and never proposed anything akin to Keynes’s GNP. The Economic Journal editors actually cite an unpublished 1940 note in Meade’s collected papers (1988: 106-17) as the source of Meade’s authorship. They did some archival-like work here. Moreover it should be recognised that they are the first people to textually substantiate the claim that Meade constructed a national accounting system – despite the lack of why he did so. Others who have written on this, have usually not even bothered with the original texts, never mind the context. So Vines and Weale  may yet be Historians, albeit not very good ones, which might be why they are so keen to avoid the title.

“Je m’en Foucault!”

French philosopher with scant recognition in his home country

My dear friend Katy is annoyed. For a few months, she’s been teaching French at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, while writing her master thesis for a French faculty. Every time she shows up at a literary theory class, the Professor expects her to master everything about Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. Yet, Katy, like most of her French contemporaries – including, I must admit, the author of these lines -, does not know these thinkers beyond the usual cliches: cool guys with turtleneck sweaters and leather jackets who supported the May 68 events before dying of AIDS or crushed by a car, but whose writings are mostly unreadable – if not simply mocked by serious scientists such as Alan Sokal. Though nothing should justify ignorance, let me tell you that we French are not really to blame. Philosophy programs in high school do not include any of these authors – we study Plato, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Sartre, leaving aside everything that has been written after the 1960s. Mainstream philosophy consists mostly of neo-Kantian scholars with long hair and white shirts – most often leaving their chest exposed – who bash May 68 on popular TV shows while advocating the return to the universal values we - the French and more widely the Western countries – have brought to the civilized world since the 1789 Revolution. There are several variants of this discourse – some more progressive and some more conservative – but this is pretty much what they say.

French philosopher with great recognition in his home country

Why such a significant portion of recent French thought remains mostly unknown in its home country yet praised and embraced by academics all over the world is the difficult question François Cusset tries to answer in his fascinating book, French Theory : Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis, certainly one of the best accounts of recent history of thought written in French I have read so far. Cusset’s main argument in this book is that the French Theory, as it is called in the US, is an American invention. He convincingly shows how the American academia, from the most revered scholars to the average undergrad, has managed to appropriate a set of loosely-related if not mutually contradictory texts to build a cohesive curriculum of knowledge which has been used to understand all the aspects of the American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting from the recent controversies surrounding the Sokal hoax, which at least served as a reminder for the French public that there were still a few influential fellow-countrymen in the United States, Cusset traces back the influence of postmodern philosophy in the foundations of the American university, showing that its location in the American society allowed for the formation of a theoretical discourse which would accompany the changes in the society – the struggle for civil rights and thereafter the birth of identity and community politics – while remaining strictly confined to the academic debate. Exploring the evolution of literary theory, the rise of gender, race and cultural studies, he shows that for all these questions, French Theory offered a convenient and malleable discourse which has been transformed and affected by the leading scholars in all of these fields. His description of some “campus stars” such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson – whose main works had not been translated into French when the author wrote the first edition (2003) – is both luscious and accurate. One of the qualities of Cusset’s work lies in the way he shows that even the criticisms of postmodernism by US scholars have fostered the dispersion of French thought. The author also devotes a chapter on the way the average undergraduate student manages to appropriate these difficult texts by applying Derridian deconstructionism or Deleuze’s “surface effects” to his everyday experiences and the study of pop culture – from Philip K. Dick to Talking Heads. What I liked the most in this account is the fact that Cusset, though he undoubtedly appears as a defender of these French and American trends in thinking, never tries to apply his judgment on the theory itself. Sometimes, he shows how X tried to demonstrate that Y’s philosophy is self-refuting or relativistic but he never commits himself to this criticism. Actually, Cusset’s own views appear only clearly at the very end when he describes the reasons why Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard have become persona non grata in their home country. The coming into power of a peculiar branch of the left in the early 80s, the rise of new philosophers, their penetration in the publishing market and their fame in the medias, the appropriation of Foucault and Baudrillard by French neoliberals leading to a lot of confusion are what prevented the French from recognizing the importance of their fellow citizens in modern thought. Cusset’s conclusion is hard to read but perfectly accurate : “What overconfident French rationalists quickly see as an old structuralist tune, as a badly assimilated linguistic turn or even as a textual relativism for Amerloques* most simply characterizes the way people, all in all, act and think since a quarter Century in the rest of the worldwide intellectual landscape” [my translation].  Finally, French Theory (the book) provides a wonderful example of how ideas travel. While writing this blog entry, I realized that it has been translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press. I highly recommend this reading.

* “Amerloques” is the French slang for Americans. By using the term, Cusset implies that a widespread anti-americanism might also be responsible for the fate of the French Theory in its home country.

Rituals

It has become a ritual of self punishment to review the state of our discipline; named History of Economics, History of Economic Thought, History and Methodology of Economics, History and Philosophy of Economics, catering to the tastes of the crowd. It is ritual because it invariably concludes all associative meetings, like the one held in Coimbra, early in the month, of the Iberian Association of Historians of Economic Thought. It is self flagellation because the news are never good, that no one cares for us and there is no future.

With one exception at the ESHET meetings in Porto, where the depression was outsourced to Young Scholars, the bearers of bad news are Full Professors, at the height of their intellectual and institutional powers. Having witnessed these moments since 2002, I am beginning to tire. In Coimbra, I was happy to hear from Ana Maria Bianchi of USP that keeping History of Economics in the curriculum takes vigilance, as she so aptly described it, a “foot in the door” and everyone “taking turns at the watch.” I was unhappy to hear from others that History of Economics should be a hobby, or hear the unsolicited complaints of how historians doing history of economics are getting the economics all wrong. It is blame the other and conform.

The future of the history of economics surely depends on us: our inventiveness, energy, enthusiasm and cooperation. But what I hear the most from people of authority is that we should give up, that they have given up. I still come to these sessions hoping for the good news from the wise and prophetic, of maybe some project to join efforts, an appeal to ambition. But maybe this is my mistake. So I decided to attend no more, and announce that the kids will go it alone if needed…

Calling all bloggers

Come out and play!

Visualization @ ESHET 2010 (March 25-28, 2010)

Hans Hoffman, The Gate, 1959-60

I am interrupting the sleep mode of the playground to publish a selfish and self-centered call for papers. For the 14th conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought in Amsterdam, I am submitting a session on the use of visual representation in economics, with the following blurb:

The last two decades have witnessed a growing literature on visualization in the history of science following the publication of Lynch and Woolgar’s Representation in Scientific Practice (1990) – see for instance a recent focus section in Isis (March 2006). Despite previous attempts to draw the attention of historians of economics and insightful published papers on the subject – e.g. a ECHE conference in 2002 and a related mini-symposium in JHET in 2003), the use of visual representation in economics remains largely misunderstood. Graphical methods, for instance, are still regarded as a mere subdivision of mathematical analysis, whereas Klein (1995), Cook (2005) and Giraud (2007) have demonstrated that they have been considered distinct from mathematics since the early days of neoclassical economics. More generally, though anyone would concede that graphs, charts, tables, pictures and illustrations are part of the economist’s workaday tools, few efforts have been engaged to understand precisely how they operate within the larger models and theoretical frameworks in which they are used. Failure to recognize the role of visualization in economics is related to the fact that historians of the field tend to focus on the development of theory rather than on the practices in which theorization is entrenched, favoring a foundational approach which undermines cultural specificities. The most recent contributions to the history of science, indeed, have pointed out that the role of visualization in science is best understood within the framework of visual culture – see for instance Luc Pauwels (ed.), Visual Cultures of Science (2006).In this session, we would like to follow this literature by bringing together a set of papers which explore the use of visual representation in connection with peculiar cultures, whether disciplinary or operating at a larger level – the birth of mass-media in the US, for instance. Contributions will focus on the invention of visual devices in relation with specific practices, on the interaction between economists and artists or on how certain visual methods are affected when audiences are different from those they were originally intended for. They need not be focused on theoretical economics but also on the use of visual representation by economic propagandists, state administrations or practitioners operating on markets

I already have two papers for the session, including one by Loic and myself on the visual display of economic information in the US during the interwar period (we draw on the FSA pictorial project and on Otto Neurath’s Isotype method). I would be happy to include one or two other papers. These may not be strictly papers on the history of economics but also papers on the history of management or general history articles which cover economic themes (for instance, economic history, history of measurement and the larger history of social sciences). Beyond the ESHET conference, this session may help launch the discussion on this neglected aspect of scientific practice and to help increase multidisciplinary work on the subject in the near future. If you have an abstract to submit, you can do this directly to me (yann.giraud[at]u-cergy.fr, replace [at] with @), I will re-submit the session as a whole before the papers are individually submitted through the ESHET website. You can also contact me if you have already submitted a paper which you think may fit this session in particular.

the audience, once more: “don’t be such a scientist”

Spotted on the excellent WUNC (North Carolina public radio) this afternoon in the “Talk of the Nations” show: an interview  of Randy Olson on his book “don’t be such a scientist. ” The talk is titled “explaining science with substance…and style.”

Randy Olson is a former marine biologist from the university of New Hampshire turned into a film maker. In the bits of the interview I got in my car, I understood that he’s been sitting in hollywood acting, performing and/or directing classes for several years and that he subsequently realized how this kind of formation would be useful for scholars.

Among the subjects tackled  during the fifteen minutes I was listening

-his fellow scientists’ reaction: “Olson is saying that we should abandon part of our scientific accuracy for the sake of communicability, that’s a shame.” The author retorts that he of course doesn’t say so, and that it is possible to reach 100% “accuracy” (that’s word used in the talk) while presenting result is a more “sexy”/appealing/”funny” ways

-as a former member of a community where scientific expertise deals with hot current issues (namely climate change), he constrast two documentary on this subject, one made by scientist whose title I couldn’t catch and Al Gore’s “An Unconvenient Truth,” of which he says no scientist was involved in. The inattention for the former and the success of the later calls for a reexamination of how scientists communicate, and  also  part of scientific inner culture. All the problem is which film would you prefer to have done: the accurate unknown or the unscientific successful one.  I guess similar questions may have been raised after Sylvia Nasar issued “A beautiful Mind” and have it turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, although I was not yet interested in
HET and therefore have no idea of the discussion raised by the book in our community.

-a comparison of the situation some scientists currently found themselves and the communication issues faced by the military a few years ago in Irak. The comparison appeals to me (with all its limitations), not only because economists may face a crisis situation today in which they prove unable to react to the attacks of those, insiders or oustiders, willing to change the contents and methods of their science, but because I know from private experience how the military in some countries are concerned with communication and are having at least some basic seminars on how to talk to journalists in the ground in periods of crisis (whatever the results).

-a reference to the new media scientists can afford on the web (twitter, blogs). He doesn”t see scientists as understanding the benefits they can draw from such opportunity. I’m not sure this would apply to the economists community.

All in all, I have no idea about the quality of the book, and this is merely a sketchy account of a sketch of an interview. And I haven’t checked on the reactions of the scientific community before writing the post. But since I don’t how long the podcast of the interview will stay online, better give the information the sooner.

Here is the page of the interview, where you can listen to it, and here is the podcast homepage (it is not on yet). Have a good ride.

Meet the author

The author was Roger Backhouse. And the book was The Penguin History of Economics (UK ed., US ed.).

I teach with Harro Maas, a course “Contemporary Economic thought in a Historical Perspective” at a new venture, modeled on a liberal arts curriculum, the Amsterdam University College. They require the first year courses to have a textbook and since we both admire Roger’s Penguin history we chose that one. It was Harro’s great idea of inviting Roger for a meeting with the students. After discussing the book for 5 weeks, they could ask questions of expansion or clarification or make suggestions to the author on what to write in future editions.

From the 25 students came questions like: what is the best form of economic organization, markets or the state? what works best capitalism or socialism? should we adopt sociological approaches to risk analysis instead of relying on mathematical models? That’s right! Students querying the historian on what economics to believe, and if the past could arbitrate on these dilemmas. Roger did his best to answer and not answer the questions, but not far into the conversation he was politely labeled a Keynesian. The tone was always interested and there was no disappointment from either side, and some questions were properly historical such as why some ideas developed in some countries (often their own) and not somewhere else…

To conclude, a student spoke of a concern that many had voiced before. Roger’s text has too many names, too much happens and it is hence difficult to summarize. The student asked for the ten most important economists of history that would make a summary. Roger gave us then a “Hamlet without the Prince”. The history of economics as the history of its identity, as subordinate to morality, breaking out as a subject in political and moral philosophy, finally in the twentieth century the economic becoming its field of professional and academic expertise.

It was all good! A perfect way to motivate students giving them a sense of ownership of the content… they are on first name terms with the author, and they even drank a beer with him.

(on other reviews Backhouse gets three 4 star reviews on amazon.co.uk, and one 2 star and one 4 star reviews on amazon.com, the American shopper is less impressed)

Referencing dilemma – what to do?

I find it frustrating when in-text references read (Keynes 1973) or (Quesnay 1963). This leaves me to go and find the bibliographical notes to try and discover which works are being referred to and when they were written.  Often the when is significant to understand what is being said by Quesnay, or ‘which’ Keynes is writing – the 1943 Treasury Civil Servant or the young man frustrated with the Versailles Treaty in 1919. If an article then refers to Keynes several times from a ‘collected works’ edition, the time context is almost impossible to decipher as every reference is to 1973 and the reader needs to check page-numbers and chapters to find the original dates. Some authors add extra text before every quote and citation which reads “In year xxx, Dr. yyy wrote”.  I feel this makes the reading slow, tedious and I still have to double-check the years after reading a quote or citation. Such referencing, to me, does not work. But what might be the best practice for referencing translated and re-printed works in the text?

Having checked the brief Harvard guide (that’s the system I’m stuck with) there does not seem to be a rule… There is a rule for translated work in the reference section – using the original year first. Similarly for articles in edited volumes the original date is noted first, with the edited volume’s year of publication later in the reference. From this I infer that the reference in the text would be to the original year and not the edited work. So what do you feel is the best practice?

Let’s take an example: There is a poem by Voltaire written in 1736 entitled Mondrain, translated first by Tobias Smollet [as Man of the World] in 1901 and this translation is re-produced (ad verbatim) in a collected volume by Henry Clark in 2003, which I am using. All this detail is in the full reference at the back. The year of the poem matters to the exposition – as Voltaire will write for another 40+ years, so what do you feel is the best reference in-text? Is it (Voltaire 1738), (Voltaire 1901), (Voltaire 2003) or something fourth, or fifth with square brackets perhaps?