History of Economics Playground

In the last few, summer, months I have been an unreliable blogger. It is going to get worse. One good reason is that I have set up a new blog that requires my attention.

For 7 weeks in September and October, I teach a class titled generically “History and Methodology of Economics”, which I have ambitiously re-named as “the politics of economics.” The course reviews literature on the place and role of economists in contemporary society from an historical standpoint. Because one of my goals for the class is to develop appreciation for the multiple interpretations of which economics is subjected to, and to the multiple uses given to economic ideas in public life, I asked them to participate in a course-blog. This will be 10% of their final grade. Their task is capture commentary on economics or uses of economics in unexpected places, notably in mass culture.

From my brief, hands in the air, survey, nearly none of the students had experience with the blogging form. So they are learning not only about the practice of observing economics in its historical drift, but also about expressing themselves in a blogging setting. I leave you here an invitation to visit, to comment and to encourage on “Observing Economics“.

Poetry pops up the strangest places… Stephen Ziliak was recently in the news for inspiring Haiku Economics, and I had gotten used to enjoying Voltaire’s prose on economics, but I was not expecting to find poetry in the US Office of Price Administration’s archives from the Second World War. But there it was, the poem “On Economists” from Fred Warner Neal at Harvard to Richard V. Gilbert, apparently unpublished, but in many places so very very spot on – even today. Neal wrote Gilbert that he was “delighted that an “economists’ economist” like yourself liked it. I don’t know how well some of the boys up here appreciated it”, and I think you’ll enjoy it too.

To avoid filling up the whole blog I have cut the poem at the third stansa, but click and it will fold out in all its glory, including some nice insights into 1943 economic thinking from the heartland of U.S. Keynesianism.

On Economists, By Fred Warner Neal:

Seeking cycles small and large,
Economists are want to barge
Upon a theory, here and there,
Devoid, perhaps (at least quite bare)
Of any rhyme of cogent reason
For being, now or in any season.

With scissors they seek to analyze
Things that never never crystalyze
Into reality, and plot curves smooth
That never will be, and try to soothe
Their brows, on fire for failing
To stop the leaks by only bailing.

Does the Margin fix the cost?
Debate on this means much time lost.
Some hide logic ’neath a hedge
Claim cost fixed at, not by, the edge;
While others, splitting hairs with sabre
Base their theories all on labor.
Or maybe on the land where sat
Once the mighty Physiocrat.
Read the rest of this entry »

The images of my summer were not of white sanded coast lines or of foaming rivers in extreme rafting. With nerdish pride, the images of my summer were genealogical trees.

In Toptaki Palace, Istanbul

In El Escorial, Madrid

In our age, genealogy has become decreasingly serious (my way of avoiding more severe terms). It is a spectacle and a recreational activity. The BBC show Who do you think you are? has experts go on the road with celebrities to discover their great grandparents. There are mega websites, such as Genealogy.com, that make birth, death and marriage records available on a click. Software lets all and any family write down and visualize DNA lines, in the confusion of multiplying last names. Finally, record offices in all countries have guides on how to construct “your” family tree.

Yet the “tree” in “family tree” had never been vivid to me, until this summer, until I saw the “tree” change in group portraits of power. The contemporary “tree” resembles a corporate organization chart, of levels advancing in overcrowdedness with thin lines of connection. The seventeenth century “tree” is leafy. The names or faces are not hanging fruit on a line, but flowers in a lush and organic setting.

To me it seems the “tree” back then asked the question “who is in?”. Today’s “trees” seem to ask “where do I fit?”

Middle of the summer… the playground looks asleep, the kids are away!

These last days, I have received – like some of you I guess – two guidelines about how to do a master or a Phd Thesis in history of economics. That is too bad that I completed mine 10 years ago! Anyway, I am not sure that these pieces are really useful for it very much depends on what is the conception of history of economics you have and you intend to convey in your work. The best advice I can give – and that is the way I proceeded myself – is to look a recent Phd Thesis from someone you respect as a scholar and whom you feel shares your general methodological outlook, and use it as a kind of reference document.  Receiving these guidelines made me wonder about the fact that in the blog, which is made by if not made for young (and not so young anymore) scholars there is, indeed, very little information about one organizes his research work.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the would-be historian of economics can safely go on the first day of his research the university library, inquire the librarian about where the complete works of Ricardo (by Sraffa) or the complete work of Marx (or Keynes or Hayek) were and very much sit here for the rest of his Phd Thesis. This is not the case anymore and it is now common and almost an obligatory requirement for a Phd student to have done some archival work. However, doing the Archives can be a very different – sometime nice, sometime quite painful – experience depending on which Archives you go. A few looks like that:

But quite often, you end up like this nice looking young researcher on the left. This image might look scary, but you may have gotten the wrong idea. Because for all the reassuring neatness and geometrical perfection of the archive below, the archivist may have done a very lousy job in cataloging it, meaning that you probably would have to open half of the drawers and go thoroughly through their content to get anywhere. Whereas, on the other hand, the half-smiling women might very well be the curator who knows in detail the content of the folders she is actually browsing for preparing the new catalog and you would get what you want in less than an hour!

More seriously, when looking forward to do an archive, it is very important to understand that the easier you get the information – by browsing on a digitallized catalog for example – the less chance you have to find something really new and unexpected. On the other hand, when you are inquiring about an archive on which you have very little information it is most important to keep a very open mind and to be a little stubborn even when the odds seems against you. Moreover, keep in mind that curators or archivists made mistakes and have limited knowledge of the content of their own archives. When one has been working for a long time in a specific archive, one often knows it better than its own curator.

Let me share a recent – last week in fact – experience I had in the Archives of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  In the context of a research project we are conducting with Yann on the visualization in US economics, we became interested in the Vienna economist and philosopher Otto Neurath and its possible connections on the other side of the Atlantic. As one of the former directors of the MSI was cousin to the economist and philosopher Otto Neurath, we inquired about the possible existence of a correspondence between the two cousins. We were told by an assistant curator that there was no correspondence. Indeed, as I discovered last week, the same assistant curator had been already sollicited, two years ago, by another researcher for the same piece and after working on it for a few days was unable to find it. The same researcher who was preparing a book on Neurath e-mailed the MSI  again a few months later because he would go to Chicago for a conference, asking if it was worthwhile passing by the Museum archives to give a try about the correspondence. As the assistant curator repeated to him that he was unable to find anything, the researcher decided not to come. Hence, when he answered to our query, the assistant curator was pretty sure that there was nothing to find.

Being in Chicago for another project, I decided to give it a try anyway and spend a few days, at least one, in the MSI archives. The first day, I came with my sole computer not knowing if there was anything worthy. Looking through the inventory (made by the same competent assistant curator mentioned above) I did find a few things, enough to spend the whole day there and too decide to come back two days later with a digital camera to save my findings. I did not find the correspondence though: at the letter “N”, there was no folder “Neurath”. However, I found a mention to a letter the former MSI Director received from Neurath in one of the documents I read. It was enough to convince that there might be something that have been missed. On the second day and after digitallizing what I had found , I decided to go ‘fishing’. What I did was fairly simple and obvious, instead of looking  at the name of the person, I looked at the name of the institution he was in charge at the time (the Vienna Museum of Economy and Society). And, indeed, I found the correspondence: dozens of letters and a few important documents that were supposed not to exist. Later on (I came for a third day), I tried to force my luck and repeat the same procedure with another individual. But this time I end up in a dead endd: the box I wanted to look at was nowhere to be found (I was looking for the box with the letter P, but the boxes between M and R were missing). We looked with the assistant curator in the premisses, but nothing! However, instead of calling it a day I asked for another kind of documents (pictures) to spend the two hours that were left for my last day at the archives. The assistant curator took me to the location where the pictures were archived but we were unable to find any of interest for me. Out of sheer curiosity, I browsed the shelves and look at the name on the boxes that were around, just to find the correspondence box I was looking after a few hours before. Inside was indeed the piece of correspondence I expected and a few valuable documents.

To sum up this very long post:

- When there might be a chance you can get an important piece of information or documentation in an archive, but you are told that there is nothing by the archivist. Try to verify it by yourself and take the necessary few days to do it properly. If you find nothing, which happens quite often, you may have lose a few hours or a few days, but if you find something unexpected you may have gain an easy and good article or a chapter from your forthcoming Phd thesis, which may in turn launch or speed up your career.

- When you plan to do an archive, use all the time you have even if the odds are that you ain’t gonna get anything more.

- Keep an open mind, if you do not find something at the obvious location it does not mean it is not there, it might have been placed somewhere else because the archivist does not have the same logic as you (you are thinking names of individuals and he sees names of institutions, or the reverse) or because it have been misplaced (shit happens).

- Do not lose heart. Especially when working on a archive that has not been properly catalogued or arranged. Quite often, the first hours or even the first days are not very useful: you do not know how to begin, what you are really looking for, you do not understand the logic of classification (which is almost always different in each archive). You may have the impression that it is like finding a needle in a haystack, there is however one big difference: when the archives are classified and most of them are, it means that there is a logic to it, you just have to find it! – Needless to say that it is easier say than done.

(if the persons pictured would like to see their portrait removed, please send me simply a note).
HISRECO: Annual conference in HIStory of RECent ECOnomic thought, taking place in Europe.
HES: History of Economics Society, gathering in the US or Canada.

The same album, but quicker to browse (smaller-sized pictures), is available here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=121531&id=522296095&l=14fd88058c

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…

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.

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on a recent comment by Robert Leonard on this blog:

“I have found the biggest struggle to be learning to stop, or suspend, thinking as an economist. A training in economics is a necessary point of departure, but it can also quickly become a yoke around one’s neck when it comes to writing history, especially a history that tries to embrace the subtleties of language and human behaviour. For that, I’m inclined to view novels and other fiction as better preparation.”

I have never been able to face the use of the novels and fiction I read without a good share of guilt. Using them to immerse in a time, to understand its beat, its fears and hopes I find acceptable (to myself), but using them to get into people’s mind with hope of better understanding people (and thus economists’ and scientists’) motives, wants, ambitions…..is this really decent? Doesn’t it make up for my lack of empathy, sensibility, observation, openess? Why am I unable to explain why I sense that my interest in science fiction should eventually permeate my historical research?

But do I have any other mean to refine this ability to “embrace the subtleties of human behavior” that makes a good historian? Also, when I’m calling in the psychological description of such character to flesh the sense of collapse and uncertainty and a jewish emigré may have felt in the early thirties or a graduate student may have experienced in Vietnam, for instance, I feel I’m making the implicit –and unwarranted- assumption that there is something permanent in the human nature that transcends times and cultures.

This unmistakably bring me back to my old missmarpling dilemma. Miss Marple is this armchair detective by Agatha Christie who is able to solve various crimes by drawing parallels between the riddles she faces and seemingly unrelated and insignificant incidents she had witnessed in her little village of Saint Mary Mead. Her idea is that “human nature is much the same everywhere” the same and that to gain insight into human motives, observing a small microcosm is sufficient. I wonder how much missmarpling historians can/ should afford? Can we write good history by comparing situations we witness or experience (including our professional tribulations) with those of previous economists, even though their individual history, context and, of course, abilities are different? Are we allowed as historians to fill the holes left by published and unpublished records, to flesh the skeleton and endow it with the voice that reflects the murmurs of our empathy for our subjects?

How I then travel from Miss Marple to Carlo Ginzburg is unclear. Is it the detective analogy that is so often used to describe’s Ginzburg’s work? Is it noting that empathy toward one’s characters is not something an historian studying witches in the XIVth century can afford, but remembering that arousing the reader’s empathy toward unknowns’ histories –microhistories- is how Ginzburg intends to restore justice and truth in history? Is it directly because of his awareness of the relationships of history to litterature (taken from this interview)?

TRG: Would it be correct to say that one of those challenges confronting history is its relationship with literature? You have often written of your interest in the modernist tradition. But literary modernism’s critique of the traditional representations of reality is frequently adduced as one of the chief examples of the impossibilities inherent in traditional historical projects.

CGinzburg: To me, that is yet another artificial contradiction. To regard history and literature as two wholly disparate fields is both mistaken and unhistorical. They have always existed in dialogue, more or less overlapping. The fact that historical writing sometimes devolves into fiction and that, furthermore, it often relies on literary models, should not surprise us. A much more challenging approach – to history and literature alike – is to start out from the fact that both disciplines share an obligation to the truth, and to see how this has been lived up to at different times. I consider literary modernism first of all as an attempt to discover new forms of truthfulness, not least on a formal plane. In that respect it is highly relevant to me as an historian.

Every literary device – be it in a fictional or historical text – makes reality visible in its own way, conveys its vision of reality. Specific linguistic forms are related to specific forms of truth, one might say. There is a kind of formal constraint at work here ­- every literary form forces us to discover one thing and ignore something else. The traditional narrative, for example, has its own innate limitations, it imposes a kind of sequential contstraint: something has to come first, something else later. When I wrote The Cheese and the Worms, I dreamed of writing the whole book on one gigantic page, so that I could escape this straitjacket. It was, of course, a ridiculous idea. But the literary form employed by the historian will always be one of the two central filters that separate the historical work from the reality it sets out to portray. The other filter is the sources themselves. Both these filters in reality imply an infinite number of potentially distorting factors. In that way, the idea of a simple historical narrative is as absurd as the idea of irrefutable historical proof.

TRG: Ever since you published your very first scientific treatise, you retained your own highly distinctive style of writing and composition. Your texts are structured in series of freestanding paragraphs or short chapters, which gives the writing a disjointed, essay-like character, even in a large work like Ecstasies. What induced you to adopt such a style ?

CGinzburg: I came across this way of setting out material when, as a young man, I read an essay by Luigi Einaudi, a distinguished economist and economic historian who eventually became president of Italy. He was the father of Giulio, the well-known publisher. The essay was constructed as a series of numbered paragraphs ­- a device which appealed to my own fascination with cinema and montage. Montage corresponds to what I consider to be the constructive element in historical studies: it makes it clear that our knowledge is fragmentary and that it derives from an open process. It has always been my ambition that the uncertainty of the research process should come through in what I write ­- I try to portray my own hesitation, so to speak, to enable the reader to make his own judgement. Historical writing should aspire to be democratic, by which I mean that it should be possible to check our statements from without, and that the reader be a party not only to the conclusions arrived at but also to the process that led to them.

From Leonard to Miss Marple and Miss Marple to Ginzburg, the relationships of historians to litterature is a fascinating one

Fernando Pessoa is by some unverified majority vote, the foremost Portuguese poet of the last century (I prefer Alexandre O’Neill). He was a brooding fella, obsessively cerebral, with a dull private life. His legacy was a trove of poems that were never intended for publication but now sustain the employment of many academics. Surely, he would not be so highly regarded if one could not make an industry out of him.

He was not humorous and not ironic. Yet, in this poem I think he tries his best to be all that,

LIBERDADE

Ah, how delightful
Not to do one’s duty,
Having a book to read
And not read it!
Reading’s a bore,
Studying’s worthless.
The sun gilds things
Without literature.

Willy nilly runs the rivers
Without an original edition.
And the breeze, this very one,
So natural, matutinal,
Since it has time, its in no hurry…

Books are papers daubed with ink.
Study’s the thing where the distinction
Is unclear between nothing and nothing at all.

When there’s fog, so much the better
To wait for King Sebastian’s return -
Whether he comes or not!

Poetry is grand, and goodness too, and dancing…
But best of all are children,
Flowers, music, moonlight, and the sun
That sins only when aborting and not bearing.

And more than all of this
Is Jesus Christ
Who knew nothing of finances
Nor even claimed he had a library…

To listen it in the original, check the video:

I made this piece a standalone contribution instead of a comment to Tiago’s post on Blogs, mainly for its length and for increased visibility (see why below). As Tiago points out, “most of the action in blogs happens tucked away in the comments sections” and their “social/collaborative dimension is the one with the greatest potential to change, to improve and to make a profound intellectual impact.” I agree, but let me stress that their social/antagonistic dimension must not be underplayed. After all, who doesn’t love a heated economic squabble? The progress of economics has been marked by debates about mercantilism, socialist calculation, marginalism, monetarism, rationality assumptions…

Blogs empower (almost) real-time debates. (For the sake of comparison: though Mises’ 1920 seminal article surely received early responses, Lange’s challenge came in 16 years later, and Hayek’s contributions to the socialist calculation debate went on well into the 60’s.) Of course, debates can linger on for years even in the digital arena, too. And, at any rate, debates do not simply pop up because there is a convenient way to debate (though that helps).

All this lengthy introduction to make just two points:

i) Indeed, blogs should be better (understood and then) valued for their contribution to the advancement of the discipline. Yet, I agree with Tim Kane that “it’s still probably not advisable for graduate students or junior faculty to blog instead of focus on tenurable research … for now”.

ii) There should exist some way to transfer the livelihood of blogs and real-time debates into academic journals. In fact, there exists one I know of. So, the increased visibility of a standalone post is to promote a brand new graduate journal: the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

The only thing graduate about the journal is that the three editors (Tyler DesRoches, Luis Mirels-Flores, and Tom Wells) are graduate students at EIPE. Other than that, it is an extraordinary product of the highest academic standards… with several extras:

* Aris Spanos’ ten pages worth of fierce reviewing/bashing of McCloskey and Ziliak’s latest book on statistical significance. And, of course, the even fiercer fighting back of the authors.

* Maurice Lagueux’s provocative dissecting of Don Ross’ new book on microexplanation, with Don Ross’ own reply.

* Cristina Marcuzzo’s inaugural address as this year’s President of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.

* An underrated means for conveying histories, stories, and ideas: an interview with Uskali Mäki.

* Summaries of recent PhD dissertations in the history and philosophy of economics.

… and much more.

I followed closely the early developments of the journal, but I admit to not having seen coming anything this good, really. If you think this is petty marketing, be informed that the entire EJPE project is open access. So, stop reading this already, and go take a look at the first issue.

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…

Browsing the net may not be the most productive thing you can do to improve your resume, but it is often amusing and it can be very useful to accelerate and improve one’s research. So I was browsing when I found this nice post on a fellow blog: http://etherwave.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/blogging-as-scholarship/

From this on, I had a look at Ben Cohen’s two short pieces (links are below). These posts and an exchange of mails we had with Tiago and Yann last week made me wonder about the reasons that lay behing my own commitment with this blog and the reason I feel it is an interesting scholarly-related task. Some like Ben Cohen believe that the main thing about blogs is that they provide for a larger audience and with a new pedagogical device. It is certainly true, but I must say that I did not realize this in the first place nor that it says much about my participation to the history of economics playground. I feel much closer to Will Thomas’s points 1, 2 and 4:

- The blog is a way to articulate more thoroughly the actual perspectives on the history of economic thought than what can be done in a journal or in a volume. In the blog, you can have something closer to a conversation than in the latters. It is much more open than a journal article or even a conference paper, in particular I encourage Phd doctorant to submit comment and queries to our respective post. On the other hand, it has the advantage of being stocked whereas a conversation is ephemeral.

- The blog is a way to speculate about one’s own research and one’s perspective on the discipline.

- The blog is a space where one can criticize the actual state of the art in History of economic thought as a way to create an alternative academic/scholarship culture for HET. This is an aspect that I feel is especially important for a blog managed by young researchers.

- The blog is a way to create links between those who post, comment and read it. Between those who post, it provides a sort of “My generation” effect which is important not only psychologically, but also because of the extention of one’s web it may result in new opportunities of cooperation and mutual exchanges. For example, I am not sure I would have begun cooperating on projects, at least as rapidly, with Tiago and Yann if the blog had not existed. But the blog is also a way to socialize with others either outside our generation or outside our community through comments or various exchanges (I read your blog, you read mine, we both benefit from it; e-mails etc.). Here again, the fluidity of the blog permits freer exchanges than conference sessions and journals and it is easier to get in touch with discipline outsiders through the blog than through an academic setting of sorts (departements, conferences, etc.).

- On a final note, I mention that I believe that blogs such are ours should be first and foremost aiming at a scholar-related audience.

http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2008/10/why_blog_the_history_of_scienc.php

http://hssonline.org/publications/Newsletter2008/NewsletterOct2008blog.html

Not from economics, but worth telling:

In the late 1970s and early 1980s B.F. Skinner was not yet very old. Born in 1904 the famous behaviorist was still busy working and teaching at Harvard Univeristy. But he must have felt old. His sternly defended and once highly influential behaviorism had gradually been discarded for a psychology that, horros of horrors, tried to open up the mind’s black box. In addition, a mathematical approach to psychology that dwarfed all behaviorism’s strict and formal claims to scientificity had strongly gained in prominence. But Skinner could not let go and sent letter after letter to his colleague Duncan Luce, by this time an equally famous cognitive and mathematical psychologist. Skinner tried to persuade Luce of the merits of behaviorism and the demerits of modelling the mind’s interior. Luce thanked him for sharing his ideas with him. Skinner sent Luce his latest book, and asked whether they could meet some time next week to discuss cognitive psychology. Pick a day and time of your convenience. One week later Luce responded politely that no unfortunately he was too busy. Lunch then? Skinner tried. But again Luce declined. A few more difficult back-and-forth polite invitations followed over the course of a few years.

Based on Luce -Skinner correspondance in archives of Harvard University