Insider Trading

Immersed in economists’ writings, correspondence and diaries (when he is lucky), the historian sometimes spends more time with his subjects than with his closest relatives. He gets acquainted with their more intimate thoughts, with every nook and cranny of their temper. And as befits a family story, he develops his own preferences. He can’t help being repelled by the self-confidence and egocentrism of a scholar, or seduced by the wit and humanity of another (and God knows how important the wit is for a woman…).

But what if, reading the story of an economist’s intellectual development, five colleagues display the same reaction: “what an unpleasant person!” What if the various biographies by family members and the numerous testimonies by former colleagues all emphasize egocentrism and self-confidence, so that the historian is left wondering whether they should be part of the history of his subject’s scholarly work? Would he be accused of lousy psychologism if he underlines their influence?

Does the historian’s personal appreciation of his subjects endanger the value of the story he is telling? And is the right criterion to judge the value of such biographical work “detachment” or something else?

It’s alive… it’s alive!!!!

The Phillips Machine has risen from the dead, or so says Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott. Calling it a “computer model of the economy” in the lead, Elliott gets the ownership part of the story right, he notes that the machine was a joint venture of Phillips and Newlyn. He then mises the target by a fist asking Professor Brian Henry a “visiting fellow at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research” for historical insight. Henry explains: “It was a child of its time. It looked at how the economy could be stabilised when people were worried about the stabilisation of aggregate demand. That is the way things were in the 1950s.” Oh those crazy 50s, where people “stabilized.” As far as I know, Phillips and Newlyn were not particularly concerned with the business cycle, although I am sure Professor Henry is.

The article misses the target by an arm and a leg when it comes to revealing economists as hopeless model builders. First, make Phillips, the machine builder, into the man from Mars. In the first paragrah he is: “an engineer turned economist from New Zealand” in the second to last, he “after struggling to get a pass in his original subject, sociology, Phillips eventually became a professor of economics at the LSE.” Second, bring a man from Neptune, to make the machine work.

It took a lecturer from the department of engineering, Allan McRobie, to get it up and running again; no economist could work out quite how Phillips had pieced the original machine together.

The only difference with the original is that McRobie has dispensed with the cochineal because it would stain the Perspex. “Everything was in the wrong place. It had been here since the 1950s but everything was connected wrong. I had to work out what he was trying to do. Economics is run by people who didn’t understand it.

He only changed the cochineal, yet all was in the wrong place? I worry that McRobie faced with the artefact decided to redesign it to “work”, instead of doing careful archaeological reconstruction. If that is the case a precious heritage of economics’ history may have been lost.

History and evolution

If it wasn’t for evolution, history wouldn’t exist. Because things are different now than they were then, historians’ excavations make sense. Histories of evolving links between evolution-inspired economics and biology thus greatly risk falling prey to post-modernist quibble. But Clement Levallois’ recent PhD thesis on the history of postwar links between economics and biology in the United States steers clear of all such cheap metaphysics and instead provides a detailed historical account of who, what, where, and why. I think this is a great piece of work. The only thing I could not figure out was why Levallois in the first chapter puts such emphasis on a “new” diachronic historiography, as contrasted with anachronistic historical understanding. The following six chapters do not seem to depend on this (originally Kragh’s) distinction and Levallois only runs the risk of being attacked for a dichotomy he doesn’t really need to explicate. In fact, in a footnote on page 26 Levallois immediately problematizes the dichotomy he just introduced. Then again, perhaps it’s just me. Historiography tends to confuse me.

@ HOPE 2008 - before Solow

It is morning here. Most of the papers at the HOPE 2008 conference on “Robert Solow and Growth theory” have been on predecessors. The point I take from most of the papers is that business cycle study (Swedish and British) led to first stabs at growth theory.

This year’s annual Amsterdam-Cachan workshop

Last Friday (December 7th) the annual one-day Amsterdam-Cachan workshop in the history of economics was held in Amsterdam. Like other years, approximately twenty people particpated, discussing such things as the Kuhn-Stigler relation (i.e. Stigler begging Kuhn to be friends with him); Sir William Temple’s late 17th century view of the Dutch, and Mandeville’s subsequent rebuttal of this then popular book; and Robbins. In fact, three out of six presentations were on Robbins, preparing for this weekend’s 75th anniversary celebration of Robbins’ Essay. Interestingly, the workshop took place at the Tinbergen Institute, the Netherlands’ foremost research school. Whoever said history of economics is out and risking to become extinct? This Friday it was an alive and kicking branch of economics.

Economics as an argument

Psychologists think highly of us economists - which has probably to do with our supposedly superior math skills. Famous psychologists like Anderson and Edwards created whole new fields in psychology on the basis of an interpretation of economics.  Anderson’s Act(-R) and Edwards’ Behavioral Decision Theory were initiated at least partly to test or provide an underlying structure for economics. But what bothers me is that their understanding of (the histroy of) economics differs completely from that of economics and its historians. Edwards for instance, introduces Samuelson as providing a normative psychological theory on individual human decision behavior under certainty, and sets himself to experimentally testing this theory. As a result our historical reflections will only be comprehensible to economists. My God, we really are an endangered species.

History as experience

In his thought provoking “Sublime Historical Experience” (2005) Frank Ankersmit redirects our attention to the origin of historical investigation. Underneath the coninuting discussion of how history is to be done and how it is and should be related to other disciplines, lingers the question what history is. What makes us aware of the past at all? Whence orginates historical consciousness? In what follows Ankersmit paints a picture of how we become fascinated by the past by means of the notion of “sublime historical experience. The book is a completely impractical and immensely erdutie account that links Rorty to Davidson to Huizinga to Holderlin. Everyone should read it.