History of Economics Playground

Paul Krugman’s New York Times article, How did economists get it so wrong? (September 6, 2009) was no doubt designed in part as a grenade to be lobbed at economics departments: to arouse anxiety and initiate discussion.  In that aim, if no other, it succeeded.  Last Friday, the grenade went off at Duke University, as the Center for the History of Political Economy hosted a department wide seminar to discuss the article.  The gathering was marked by a general sense of unease and unhappiness: some were annoyed by Krugman’s hypocrisy and tone and some were annoyed with the economics profession.  But many, as it turns out, still think that the greatest days of neoclassical economics are ahead of us and were very annoyed with Krugman for suggesting otherwise.

A macroeconomist, an economic historian and a historian of economics introduced the seminar.  The macroeconomist, clearly angered, promised not to speak for long, save to tell those assembled that the article demonstrated ignorance and vitriol: most of Krugman’s accusations were not true: macroeconomists were always trying to incorporate money and the financial sector into theory.  And as for Krugman’s argument that economists think that the more mathematically beautiful the model the better, nothing, we were told, could be further from the truth.  Testing theory against reality is all that matters to this macroeconomist.

The economic historian was less personally offended.  Krugman had raised some fair questions.  After all economists had not been sufficiently vocal in alerting the world to the unsustainable nature of the past few years and perhaps the emphasis on modeling had produced a certain selective blindness.  Finally, the financial sector had clearly not played the role in economists’ models that it should have done.  Still, the question remained: what is the ‘real’ problem here for economists?  Is this about the reputation of economists, a little bit of hurt pride; or is the economics profession actually part of the problem?  After all, the question was posed, how much influence does university economics really have on policy anyway?

Well, of course, I don’t know the answer to this question.  But judging from some of the comments from the room, it seems that most economists have a pretty high regard of their profession.  Not least of all Krugman himself for, as the panel member representing the history of economics pointed out, Krugman’s tone did not lack in arrogance.  For a start Krugman had placed himself above the profession even though he himself is as much implicated in his complaints as anyone else.  Moreover, were economists really to blame for the financial crisis: wasn’t the real problem with failed regulation, rather than economic theory?

Now it’s a funny thing.  Neoclassical economists working within the mainstream, either general equilibrium-ites or Chicagoans wouldn’t, I suspect, profess much love for Krugman, but they certainly do share his opinion when it comes to the importance of economics.  Thus we were told: if only the incentive structures for risk managers had been right, then these managers would have flagged up the risks to their bosses that were, apparently, all too evident in the value-at-risk models.  So the problem, it turns out, wasn’t the models (based as they were on only a few years data), but that economist hadn’t ALSO designed the internal management incentive structures.  But if you remain unconvinced by this then there was even more hubris to come.  It’s only a matter of time, we were told by another attendee, before the neo-classical approach can truly meet its destiny and provide a unified theory of everything (in the economy, just in case you wondered).  House values, financial sector leverage and option pricing, just three problems that will in time be solved.

So there you have it.  Perhaps those who thought that economists (including Krugman) were overstating their role in causing the crisis were right after all.  But, never fear, in the future ‘the general neo-classical theory’ of economics would be there to guarantee that things could never get of control again.  Well, that’s a relief.  Alternatively of course, some might suggest that the real battle in the room was between relative delusions of grandeur: the delusions of those who think that economists had caused this crisis and those who think that economists will in the future ensure we have no more.

To be fair, there were some dissenting voices in the room.  One contributor argued passionately that economics had reached such a level of arrogance that almost no economists were now taught basic skills, like how to read a balance sheet, a skill that would apparently have alerted many to the impending problems at the banks.  Another contributor suggested that economics could never be equipped to be able to definitively say when an asset was overvalued.  Modern economics after all is based on the idea that value is a function of the buyer’s personal assessment of value and utility.  How could economics ever say for sure that someone was overestimating what something was worth to them?  Were not questions about inflated asset prices moral and social questions beyond the realm of economics?

Still one suspects these comments fell on deaf ears.  As another contributor pointed out, the incentive structures in the profession were all wrong.  Such was the structure of modern universities that graduate students were so invested in current ways of thinking that they were always going to be unlikely revolutionaries in the discipline.  Economists misunderstanding incentive structures, institutions do play a role after all?? Never! I refuse to believe it!

A Duke maling-list message just made me aware of this article from the University of Chicago magazine, “Chicago Schooled: the visible hand of the recession has revitalized critics of the the Chicago School of Economics.” It offers an interesting and quieter counterpart to the Krugman debate which is turning into a settling of old scores, but the bottom issue is the same. How much is the Chicago genealogy, from Murphy and Cochrane back to Heckman, Pelzman Fama, Becker, Stigler, and, of course, Friedman (how comes? ) among many others, and its market enthusiasm responsible for the present crisis.

Even more interesting is the use made by the author of recent works by historians of economics, mentioning Ross Emmett and Phil Mirowski.

Here’s the extract:

“The 2008 market collapse shocked the global economy like nothing since the Great Depression. Given the breadth of the failures involved, casting blame at a single school of thought may seem overly simplistic. But the Chicago School’s ardent championing of market forces, says Ross Emmett, a Michigan State University economist who studies the Chicago School and heads an oral history of it, makes it “a convenient locus” for anger.

Chicago’s market focus developed as the original Frank Knight/Jacob Viner Chicago School—also anti-Keynesian but skeptical of markets’ efficiency and mathematical models—waned along with World War II. The government’s influence on the University’s scientific-research funding disturbed then-president Robert Maynard Hutchins, according to Philip Mirowski, professor of economics and the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame, and coeditor of the new book The Road from Mont Pelerin. (The Mont Pelerin Society was a Friedrich Hayek–led debating organization dedicated to advancing free-market ideals, including markets’ ability to efficiently show information.)

In 1946 Chicago already had a neoclassical presence: the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, funded by Alfred E. Cowles III, scion of one of the Chicago Tribune’s owners. Cowles’s postwar staff at Chicago included nine future Nobel laureates, among them Kenneth Arrow and Tjalling Koopmans, who won Nobels in economics before Friedman. Cowles promoted an economics more scientific than the theoretical type that dominated the field at the time. But he was left-leaning. Hutchins wanted specifically anti-statist thinkers, Mirowski says, enlisting help from the now-defunct libertarian William Volker Fund to hire, among others, Aaron Director at the Law School, Friedman (Director’s brother-in-law) in economics, and Hayek at the Committee on Social Thought (the economics department nixed Hayek). Cowles would decamp to Yale in 1955. »

As an aside, there is increasing references (on the blogosphere) to the paper by Robert Gordon on the development of macroeconomics since the 70s in the light of the current crisis which was presented at the 1^st ISHET. It is viewed as a more balanced criticism of the current state of macro research than Krugman’s.

Is the next step the recognition of HET as useful knowledge for economists in a time of crisis?

The First International Symposium on the History of Economic Thought (ISHET) took place in the Department of Economics at the University of São Paulo from August 3rd to the 5th. The theme of this event was “The Integration of Micro and Macroeconomics from a Historical Perspective” and it brought together a group of renowned historians of economics from abroad as well as local members of this community. In the audience, besides the local discussants and the presenters, there were many students and professors from other Brazilian universities who all basically stayed throughout the symposium.

The symposium was opened by Robert Gordon (Northwestern University), a macroeconomist who has contributed to important discussions in this field since the 1970s–he obtained his BA from Harvard in 1962 and his Ph.D. from the MIT in 1967. The title of Gordon’s lecture was “American Debates on the Sources of Business Cycle” and in it he made an overview of developments in macroeconomics and the problems brought up by the current crisis–he criticized the current macro models for failing to incorporate many elements that are central to understanding the current crisis (echoing criticisms of other economists that the current synthesis in macroeconomics is simply useless).

The first historians to present, in the first day, were Kevin Hoover (Duke University) and Robert Leonard (Université du Québec à Montréal). Kevin discussed that there are different programs of microfoundations, instead of just the one associated with Robert Lucas and his critique of macroeconometric models used for policy analysis. He argues that the distinction between micro and macroeconomics—and the questions of how one relates to the other—dates from the 1930s and that besides the microfoundations of Lucas (within a representative-agent framework), there are two other programs: one Marshallian, rooted in Keynes’s General Theory, and a fixed-price general disequilibrium theory associated with economists like Patinkin, Clower, and Barro and Grossman. He paid special attention to the relationship of such programs to those of general equilibrium and econometrics that date both from the 1930s. Leonard discussed the questions of foundational critique in economics through Oskar Morgenstern’s life and transformations (questions about the role of mathematics in economics, how to model time, among others): from his Austrian breeding to his Princeton years and work with John von Neumann in the 1940s.

In the second day, the presenters were Wade Hands (University of Puget Sound) and Philip Mirowski (University of Notre Dame) in the morning, and Michel De Vroey (Université Catholique de Louvain) and myself in the afternoon. Wade made a very interesting parallel between the rise and fall of Keynesian macroeconomics and the kind of (Walrasian) general equilibrium in microeconomics that emerged during and after World War II. He used the idea of co-evolution to explore the mutual stabilization of Keynesian macro and Walrasian micro. Phil, in his usual enchanting way of a showman, showed the anti-Keynesianism that characterized the three main schools in economics, in the period 1943-1954: Chicago, the MIT and the Cowles Commission, with a focus on the latter two. By doing so, he pondered the recurrent need several economists have of calling themselves Keynesians (he talked about a “zombie Keynes” and compared the neoclassical economists to the Wile E. Coyote, trying to catch Road Runner always with a new technology, but ending up just with the “Beep beep” sound… Wait to watch the video online!).

In the afternoon, Michel discussed to what extent the new classical and real business cycle (RBC) “revolution” in macroeconomics was a matter of microfoundations: he first appraised the “strictness” of Lucas’s microfoundations, then characterized the new classical/RBC movement as a Kuhnian revolution in two stages, and even discussed the possible political agenda of their members. Finally, I closed the day with a discussion on how macroeconomists now perceive the new synthesis in their field (what are its main elements) and how such perception is linked to their understanding of how macroeconomics evolves over time (with a widespread notion of knowledge accumulation). I then discussed how a particular set of elements, mainly the assumption of a representative agent and a particular call for microfoundations (à la Lucas), delimited an area in which the new classicals, RBC theorists and new Keynesians could trade and construct the current consensus.

In the last day, in the morning, there was a round table with the participation of all presenters: each had 10 minutes to ponder the general theme of the symposium, before we opened the floor to questions. The discussion was lively and interesting. In the end, several participants saw that many questions and future points of research emerged during the event, which is indeed a very positive thing.

You can call it scandalous; you can call it Mickey Mouse; you can even call it fried chicken, if you want. But the session titled “From History of Economics to Histories about Economics” at the last HES meeting in Denver was just a thrilling experience. Let me explain in a few words what its purpose was. The last few years have witnessed the development of a literature about the history of economics outside of our field. Historians of science, economic historians and journalists (among others) have begun to write about the same issues we are (supposed to be) interested in and most of the time, they do not quote historians of economics. How did it happen? It is very simple, actually, and could be summed up in Stanley Fish’s terms: 1) Do your job, 2) Don’t try to do someone else’s job, 3) Don’t let anyone else do your job. Historians of economics have tried to act as economists, using the past to build alternative economic models or criticizing mainstream economics on its own terms. By doing so, they have created a “What If” History of Economics, one that builds parallel stories that can be understood only within the community, but offers virtually no insight on its recent developments, its status as a science or its cultural influence. On the other hand, you have another kind of accounts, such as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. They provide a more caricatural view of the economist as a torturer, mass-murderer and conspirator. Historians of economics may find them shocking (that’s the word, indeed), misinformed, misleading and dangerous, but those accounts have a significant appeal beyond our small community, and by refusing to address them in some ways, considering them as popular rubbish, we choose to remain in self-referentiality.

During this session, Loïc Charles, Harro Maas and Tiago Mata presented a perspective on the future developments of our field, not by restating previous positions, but by looking at possible new ways of doing the history of economics. Looking at recent developments in other fields such as history of science, economic history and political science, Loïc observed that non-disciplinary histories of economics are currently being written, offering a new intellectual space of trade between these various communities. Harro, by resorting to the metaphor of the historian as a curator, showed that we can build new narratives on the history of economics if we try to go beyond the text, arranging economics as a series of objects. For someone like me who studies the place of visual representation in economics, this metaphor has a strong appeal. I look at the large amount of visual materials I collected over the years (books, digital pictures and scans) and realize I use them in a very conservative way in comparison to the vast possibilities that are open if I think of them as pieces of art which would have to be curated in an exhibition. Would it provide a different kind of history? Last but not least, Tiago used Fish’s concept of interpretive communities to construct a picture of the public imagination of economics in recent works, without distinction between works intended for an audience of specialists and those intended for a larger audience. In Tiago’s account, indeed, there is no “audience” understood as this abstract mass of people out there, there are only anonymous individuals, internet users and bloggers, all contributing to create some understanding of economics.

I would not assert that these papers are perfect. They were intended for discussion rather than for immediate publication and I should say that the presentation itself seemed to me better than the actual papers. The presentation, actually, was quite spectacular. It had a kind of restrained violence toward the audience – the violence became less retrained during Tiago’s presentation when spectators were exposed to Klein’s striking rhetorics by way of graphic images – and the tension was palpable. In the same way art history has gradually given way to visual studies and visual culture, these papers may be viewed as an attempt to get rid of the “old” history of economics and to replace it by “economics studies” or “economic culture”. This is not a mere question of wording, it is a deeper transformation of our field. The skepticism of many attendants, explicit or implicit, makes sense.

I took the participant list of the last History of Economics Society (HES) meetings, and classed the participants by nation of affiliation, i.e. nation of home institution. (In the few instances of scholars with two homes, I took as reference the institution of their email account. The “Other” category collapses all countries with only one participant: South Africa, Australia, South Korea, India, Mexico, Denmark and Belgium.) The population was 155.

This exercise says little if one has no term of comparison and I have to look in my files to see if I have lists of participants for earlier HES meetings, or ESHET. What is striking is that North America accounts for less than 50% of participants, with a few institutions heavily represented. France was the second largest at the Denver meetings. 63 Europeans nearly matched the 64 participants from the USA. Is HES still American?

This generous, albeit unoriginal, assessment met my presentation at the 2009 HES meetings. It came from a prominent member of our profession. We share a profession. We don’t share a craft. We work on similar subjects and materials but we make of them different artifacts. After laborious cutting, assembling, and tinkering, I get an argument on how ideas co-produce society and culture, some of my colleagues conclude on the rightness of economic interpretation.

My folly?

Politeness does not come with seniority and there is no reason why it should. Tenure is after all full dominion over self. However, lack of seminar manners towards an initiate, like me, seems to contradict the rhetoric of “nurturing” young scholars. It may be that contributions of the young are welcomed provided they remain within the fold of the old. It would be a strange reversal of the world if the established had to listen, or even consider, the arguments of the junior staff.

Despite my bitterness, and after all has been said, “Mickey Mouse” is not a bad label for someone trying to make sense of popular culture and economics’ part in it. And, I do have big ears…

Candido Portinari's tile panel ("Boys Swimming", 1955) (Portinari Project Archive, all rights reserved)

“The Integration of Micro and Macroeconomics from a Historical Perspective” is the theme of the Fist International Symposium on the History of Economic Thought (ISHET) to be held at the Department of Economics at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, on August 3-5, 2009. The international speakers include Robert Gordon, Michel De Vroey, Wade Hands, Kevin Hoover, Bruna Ingrao, Robert Leonard, and Philip Mirowski. A host of local scholars will discuss the papers presented at the symposium.

Since many of you will not be able to attend the symposim (shame on you!), the organizers are working on having it streamed live on internet and recorded (in order to make the videos freely available on internet afterwards). For further information on this (to be posted later) and for further details, please check the symposium webpage at:

http://www.usp.br/feaecon/ishet/

Pedro Garcia Duarte & Gilberto Tadeu Lima (organizers)

P.S.: The poster of the symposium and the webpage use the above painting by a famous Brazilian painter, Candido Portinari (1903-1962). How do you see its relationship with the title/topic of the symposium?

Mild and cozy are the attributes of most conferences I go to these days. My peer group is deficient in Messianism: historians of economics generally do not proclaim themselves world saviors. You don’t get big speeches or melodrama, or wolfish competitiveness. The faces repeat and so too the conversations. Then, what you lose in novelty you get back in friendly admiration.

Exceptions to the rule come by design. For some years, the History of Political Economy Group at Duke University has run annual conferences, where by invitation, open call or a cocktail of the two, they have brought historians and practitioners to converse with our tribe. This year the topic was “The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and the Neighboring Disciplines since 1945″, organized by Philippe Fontaine and Roger Backhouse. Doubling as whistleblower and anthropologist I don’t want to rerun the good fare of the meeting (buy the book when it comes out, or rent the DVD).

Here is some stage setting. The meeting was held in the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. The building resembles a closed courtyard with the meeting rooms and offices squaring an inner core, whithin a set of stairs level with sofas and tables halfway between floors. To me it evokes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. (I once saw it full, all the way up, into the corridors, as people crowded to hear Paul Krugman.) In the conference meeting room were about 20 conference participants, discussants and observers. The attendance was made up of historians of economics and historians of social science. The proposition of the meeting was that everyone would speak authoritatively about the social sciences with special attention to economics’ place in post World War II dynamics.

Here is what happened. They danced. (Ok, i am writing this late while listening to remixes of Shakira!) That is the best analogy I can find to describe the mood in the room. The historians of social science were careful not to step on the economics, mostly they avoided making any moves that direction, waiting for historians of economics to lead and fill in. The historians of economics were equally prone to immobility in swinging into other social science histories. This conference opened up the realization that “neighboring” historians need to practice the dance. In the politeness hid a deeper estrangement. What held them up was a sort of Orientalism. Historians of social science from their historiographic vantage point saw economics as the other, monolithic, right leaning, authoritative, isolationist and imperialist; the Other. Historians of economics saw it as a Self: diverse, layered, complex, alive.

In the twentieth century, the social sciences have scraped, overlapped, intersected, in think tanks, in government offices, in rhetorical scripts and cultural imperialism. Historians look at snapshots of contact and contrast. The questions tend to be ones of difference. Why this won and that lost? Why this is turquoise and that one pink? My suggestion is to divert our gaze from the boundaries parsing economics, psychology, sociology. Abandon the case studies. Look at the social sciences in narratives as a cultural force shaping public life. The identity game is expelled, projected out. We are left with science and society.

Back from Amsterdam where I attended the Observation in economics and natural sciences, historically considered’s conference (http://historyofeconomics.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/observer-and-observed/). In the conference, several discussions have focused on whether there was some difference between observations in natural and social sciences (at least  for the sake of history).

While opening the Saturday issue of Le Monde, I found an article (reproduced from the NYT) titled: “Physicist Tried to Outwit Wall Street. They Failed”, that put (at least for me) these discussions in an interesting perspective. One of the quotations from the main character, the former physicist turned professor of finance, Emanuel Derman, is interesting. He wrote in his biography: “In physics there may be one day a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you’re lucky if there is a usable theory of anything.” I take this quote as representative of what many scientists , who believe that there is a lot of differences between natural and social science, think. The question is: does it matter to us, historians. I do not think so. In the face of history, all sciences are equal!

This Thursday and Friday I observed attendance to a workshop organized by my colleague at the University of Amsterdam, Harro Maas. The workshop was the first major event of a 4 to 5 year project considering methodologically and historically the practices of observation in economics. Following the “house rules” the project will draw comparisons between the social and the natural sciences. In attendance of the workshop were a number of big names (and brains) in the history of science and economics, and I felt this strange weight on my shoulders as I awaited my turn to speak. The presentation was about how Leonard Silk used drama to communicate with economists and his readers, and was itself tragic. No one was really sure what my paper had to say about observation.

I had not thought hard enough about what I knew about observation and what I wanted to say about it. In studying economic journalism I try to consider it as a an observational practice, but it is hard to follow journalists as they skim through a sea of sources, interests, pressures, conventions. I have tended to leave that part of my story for a later date. Instead, I have studied how, between 1950 and 1970, stories about economics changed, and how the status and place of economic journalism has evolved in the publishing business. Yet, as I follow journalists in conversation with economists, with readers, with editors, can I say that they are only producing content and not collecting it? Can I say that there is no observation in communicating?

Considering other papers in the workshop among my favorites was Tom Stapleford’s story of how “field agents” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics turned from “experts” with a intuitive knowledge of communication, into “operatives” following well designed data collection scripts. The BLS was disciplining its employees. This kind of “panoptic” observation seems to be the rule of modern bureaucracies. The observer is himself observed by an architecture of procedures. The observer observes the other to gather data and himself to enforce rules of objectivity.

This takes me to the relationship between the observed and the observer and how many combinations one might have. Ted Porter’s story of Le Play noted how class and ideological membership separated the social scientist from his subject, requiring the intermediation of town mayors. The same problem was manifest in Anne Secord’s account of studies of the condition of the Manchester poor (F. Engels gained access through his Irish lover). It may be that natural science observation has contently employed various forms of eye holes, while social sciences, people studying people, has required a different kind of optical/social technology. Although at times social scientists will remain behind the door, looking in silence, they will often engage their subject. In this sense, journalists ad my story seem less exceptional. Journalists communicate, and they observe while communicating, and they develop strategies to construct identity and difference from their subjects: the economists and the public. They do it to seduce and provoke. They do so to initiate a conversation and a relationship without which there is nothing to observe.

Punch (1851): Useless Information (John Leech Sketch archives from Punch): "Now, Marm, this goes to the Christial Palis." / "Bless the man! I don't want no Christial Palises. I am goin' to the borough."

Last Friday, the graduate students from my department interested in macroeconomics organized a round table on the so-called “New Neoclassical Synthesis”, as Goodfriend and King (NBER Macroeconomics Annual, 1997, pp. 231-283) called the convergence in method in macro: the fact that “all” macroeconomists seem nowadays to subscribe to the use of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for the analysis of the business cycle and growth.

The students invited three macroeconomists trained in different traditions (two were more “new classicals” and the other was more “post-Keynesian”) and myself to discuss the convergence in macro. The event surprisingly attracted a wide range of people to the audience: graduate students in general, other faculty members working on different areas, and undergraduate students (probably looking more for the heat of the debate than for its light…). A room for 130 people was packed.

The discussion was lively and interesting. One issue that was raised by one presenter was that academic economists do things for grasping better how the economy works, while economists at the Central Banks have to use in the best way they can the available theory to prescribe economic policies (clearly in a different time frame than the academics’), and economists and journalists in the media strategically criticize both academics and policymakers in order to sell their products.

In this vein, it was very interesting that a day prior to the event a friend had just called my attention to Willem Buiter’s comment on Financial Times (March 3rd). According to Buiter, who has important academic and policymaking credentials, modern macroeconomics has to be rewritten almost from scratch: it is simply incapable of dealing with economic problems during “times of stress and financial instability.” Thus, I add, macroeconomists may be proud of spreading the word that they now have a consensus method for doing economics, but a useless one according to some people: simply the wrong direction.

The current economic crisis may bring novel ways not only of doing economics but possibly also of looking at and using its past, a hope (or doubt?) with which Craufurd Goodwin closed his Palgrave (2008) entry on the history of economic thought. Any bets?

On Saturday, first day of the ASSA meetings, Tim Kane, blogger at Growthology hosted a lunch for economist bloggers. The list of the invited and the conclusions of the meeting can be read here. The History of Economics Playground was not invited. Had it been, it would have kept its head down trying to stay away from crossfire. Because I had left my “blue helmet” at home and was giving a paper at the same time, I was not prone to crash the party.

The conversation during and after brings out some interesting threads. Looking at Marginal Revolution, economist bloggers worry about think tank and ideological takeover and whether blogging will ever count as tenure worthy publication.

The effort of the Kauffman Foundation, shared by the participants, is to reflect on blogging practice. They hold the belief that the medium is still developing and innovation is desirable. Notably, they looked on to the editorial practices of the “oldie” Slashdot, and noted that most of the action in blogs happens tucked away in the comments sections.

From my own experience I agree that the social/collaborative dimension is the one with the greatest potential to change, to improve and to make a profound intellectual impact.

Like the ethnographer in exotic settings, I participated at this year’s ASSA meetings with ears and eyes tracking the bizarre and quaint. Economists are a strange tribe. They dress in gray suits, have gray hairs, and get excited by the grayest of subjects. In their conversations two terms caught my attention.

Workhorse

The term is applied to the functional form of models, often their production side. The analogy seems to suggest that the function so identified is the preferred for a certain modeling community and that it is the device that produces dynamics, pulls, works.

Zombies

The term is used mainly in among the finance clan. It denotes those companies or banks that although insolvent are rescued by government intervention and linger on thanks to the handout. Deciding who is alive and who is a zombie is a puzzle since creative accounting and off balance sheet practices may hide abominations.

Yesterday was the Amsterdam-Cachan Fall Workshop, aka “research day,” in the history of economics. The venue was held in the seminar room of the Tinbergen Institute, neighbor to the Faculty of Economics of the University of Amsterdam. The room was nicely packed. Unbenounced to the participants there was a secret society infiltrating the event. Two of the presenters were members of this blog, and two more “kids” were in the audience. World domination is in our grasp.

Besides our two papers, there were presentations by David Gindis, University of Lyon 2, surveying a close and distant history of conceptualizations of the firm as a legal person/entity/fiction, and Chris Renwick, University of Leeds, giving the tortured history of sociology at the London School of Economics and its self design as social biology. Finally, Roger Backhouse gave a draft of his (and Philippe Fontaine’s) introduction to an edited volume on the history of Post-WWII social science. One should applaud this project for its originality and the wealth of the materials it was unearthed. (I learned, for instance, that psychology headed many of the interdisciplinary efforts of the social sciences!) Omissions are a disclaimer in such comprehensive histories, and Roger was rowing against a stream of criticism when the floor opened for questions.

I want to reject our academic navel gazing, and the belief that “the dynamics of academia is surely too complex to be captured in a book”, or an introduction to a book. It should be easier to write a history of post-WWII social sciences than a history of economics from Aristotle to the present. The project is feasible. The trouble is how to write it? How to structure your text to stack up the materials? One might structure the introductory survey in short segments. This is how the authors are drafting it, slicing sections suffixed “context” (too much “context” however endangers semantic spillage). The assumption is that academia despite its internal mutation and biodiversity was faced with the same environment. It is one way to strike sameness. But I would look for it at another level, thinking cohorts and generations. Imagine three generations, one coming of age in WWII, another in the Cold War, another in the 1960s, and follow that generation around. For each generation one could select a branch of social science (scientists) to describe. As one follows the travels of our Odysseus, one could remark on how other social sciences faired. The social science interactions would come out vividly from a microcosmic vantage point.

To conclude, I file my suggestion for the Cold War period, be the turtle…

Observing Sputnik through telescopes at the astronomic post of the Novosibersk Institute of Geodasy, Aerial Photography and Cartography.

During my forced quarantine, I have read this blog with a rough and absent-minded eye. Upon return, loose fragments and sensations of what has been going on here are surfacing: the financial crisis and how to make its history, political discourses, brains, expertise, trust, Joe and Barack, TV, teaching, researching and publishing, asset prices, and the debate over the amount of posts dealing with 2008 in a blog devoted to the history of economic thought. Could this characteristic reflect a concern with recognition, intellectual and institutional? Our eagerness to have the new approaches we are striving to develop assessed by historians’ standards, and the necessity to meet economists’ standards in front of colleagues, students, and reviewers? Our willingness to prove that studying the past doesn’t make us has-beens, how our knowledge is relevant for today (despite repeated acknowledgment that ‘it doesn’t/ shouldn’t matter’)?

Or maybe it is only the reflection of my own confusion that I see in these posts. For, each time I wander around the New York Times website or some economists’ blogs and columns, I see double.

I see that Chris Romer has been appointed chair of the CEA and L.H. Summers director of the National Economic Council. The web is crowded with their curiculums, their past successes and failures as academics and advisors, with statements of how persuasive, influential and “intellectually intimidating” they are. I read titles about “Obama seeking credibility with economic appointments,” about “the Econ ‘dream team.’” And I cannot help tying this to the series on Collins and Evans’s Sociology of Expertise and Experience I read on the etherwave blog, and wondering what this news says on how scientific expertise and credibility are built, on how specific the relationships of economists to the political power is. I can’t help but notice how Romer’s work on the Great Depression is used to guarantee her expertise, and speculate on the similarities and differences with Friedman’s case.

I see that Krugman got the Nobel prize, I read the reactions by academics or journalists, the speculations that the Nobel Prize has been awarded for Krugman’s ideological opposition to Bush, that this choice was driven by the crisis context, and I find attempts, by Ed Gleaser for instance, to separate the scientist from the public intellectual :

“In his public role, Paul Krugman is often a polarizing figure, loved by millions but also intensely disliked by his political opponents. I still chuckle over an old New Yorker cartoon with one plutocrat saying to another that he gets some satisfaction from the fact that his vote will cancel out the vote of Paul Krugman. Within the less divided world of the academy, Mr. Krugman’s economic research has generated plenty of light, but far less heat. His papers are universally acknowledged to be immense contributions that helped to create two distinct fields. His Nobel Prize is extremely well deserved and not unexpected.”

Having just defended a dissertation on the links between economists’ private values and their research, I cannot help reflecting on such a sharp distinction between the economist qua scientist and the economist qua public intellectual. Does Krugman live two lives? Does he have two brains? Does his use of his scientific expertise in his columns make his opinion more scientific? Does requiring that laymen be able to separate the scientist from the columnist make sense?

I also wonder whether my historian’s reading of these events is different from that of a sociologist, whose field of inquiry includes the present, or whether studying the present de facto implies that I use sociological rather than historical methods, concepts, etc. I wonder if looking at the present through the lenses of the past (or at least the framework I built to study the forties and fifties) is relevant at all.

Five years ago, the concerns we express on this blog would have resulted in a HES session on the ‘future’ of HET. But we’re now standing right in this muddy ‘future.’ Should we organize a session on the history of current economics?