History of Economics Playground

These days I listen to a lot of podcasts. I cycle to work and the podcasts help to distract me from traffic and make the ride more exciting. I pick up a lot of lectures from the LSE, the University of California TV system, Woodrow Wilson School, and Duke. I listen to some National Public Radio and Bloomberg and get the promo podcasts for a few magazines. I also download some science popularization but find these too hysterical to bare, so they are piling up unattended on my iTunes.

I would like to listen to more interview and roundtable discussion on history. The model I am looking for is Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on history, or Russ Roberts’s EconTalk on economics. Does any one have suggestions?

The United Nations released its World Digital Library: an open digital library collecting materials from several different countries, in different languages and from different time periods.

Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, White House, 1970 (National Archives and Records Administration, USA)

This was a project proposed to the UN by James Billington, director of the US Library of Congress. It provides nowadays access to the libraries of 32 institutions. The UN has as a goal to expand the number of institutions that are part of this project.

There are different types of materials available: books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints and photographs, and sound recordings. As far as I could sense, the majority of this material is from the period before the XIXth century. The items prints and photographs, motion pictures and sound recordings are probably the ones containing most of the material from the last century. I couldn’t find anything related even to famous economists (Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, etc). Nonetheless, as the UN promises to expand the project, this may become a more relevant source for the majority of the historians of economics.

To echo Yann’s reflection on wikipedia, I want to say a few words on my difficulty using economic blogs as an historical object. There are the very few posts I publish on this blog and there are the numerous I trash before they reach the playground. One reason for this is that I’m often left wondering about the significance of the opinions, anecdotes, controversies and disputes I find on the web, and on economists’ and journalists’ blog in particular –from Mankiw and de Long’s blogs to New York Times columns including Krugman’s,to  the freakonomics and marginal revolution blogs and others. Does such and such opinion reflect a wider one within the profession (and which professin matters: academic economists, economists working in administrations, banks, columnists, journalists…), does such and such event reflect a general move, a cultural evolution, an historical trend ? What are the blogs that matter and how do they matter? I remember this discussion we had with Tiago on wikio, technorati, and other ranking tools, where “authority” (in technorati) is estimated by counting the links to a blog within the last 6 months or 30 days. We discussed the limits of such tools (you have to ask to be registered, so what if you don’t want to enter the game?), in particular the use of links as a yardstick (what if a blog function as a forum where people discuss in the comments rather from blogs to blogs, what if “visual” content such a charts or videos is generally more “linked” that columns or texts), and most important, we discussed the meaning of such ranking. Tigao found them useful as measures of conversation, social networking. I found them limited and problematic as measures of influence (as regards the spread of ideas, the impact on decision makers, for instance), popularity and power. There are two sets of questions recurring with my everyday use of blogs:

-How do we use them in a research on the history of current economics? Will they replace Friedman’s Newsweek columns? Or do they vividly display science in the making the way the minutes of the first Mount Pelerin Society or Herbert Simon’s handwritten notes of meetings at the Ford Foundation do? Or rather opinion in the making? How to make sense of the comments which feed blogs when then are mostly anonymous. How are we to handle the multiple identities of those researchers-academics-columnists-bloggers-citizens-public intellectuals? Are blogs a separate forum? Do they replace others or get a new function?

-How do you proceed to feel the zeitgeist of our times? Do you have a list of blogs and sites to eat up with the morning coffee ? If so, how does such list evolve over time? Do you just swin with the tide, jumping from links to links? What media and ideas do you choose to remember our times and how?

This is the wordle of the playground, i.e. the cloud of most common words we use here. From now on I intend to write ever other sentence with: Smith, knowledge, book, science, one, one.

Reviewing (i.e. bashing) David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Philip Mirowski (2007: 492), concluded:

I pity the poor student of modern economics, trying to make some sense of what can only appear to the outsider as cryptic oracular pronouncements emitted from people who claim to be experts in the nature and validity of knowledge.* But when you get your news from Jon Stewart, your history from Paul Krugman, and your research facts from Wikipedia, maybe the nature of knowledge has itself changed.

The end of the sentence is tinged with what I believe is Mirowski’s utter disdain for popular culture. It takes, however, just a few days for a non-American person to realize that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is certainly a better source of information than any other cable news (CNN included …), though I personally prefer the Colbert Report.

But my question is: what about Wikipedia? I have to confess I use it quite frequently,  for some basic research at work as well as for some more silly inquiry about music, cinema or celebrities at home.  Of course, I never take the information that is given there as granted and I think it is rather crucial to double check it with a more formal source of information, but I have largely benefited from the bibliography that is often provided at the end of articles. I am fairly impressed by the fact that some anonymous people have spent some time writing on E. Roy Weintraub or Waldemar Kaempffert, sometimes advertising the works of others without any reward. All in all, there is an underlying model of disinterestedness scientists should be proud (or envious?) of … Why, on the contrary, they spend so much time bashing it is therefore a mistery to me. Where does this idea that an increasing dissemination of knowledge corresponds to a degeneration of its substance come from? Jealousy? Elitism?  Declinism? Conservatism? Repugnance for the “neoliberal” ideology they think such modes of dissemination sustain?

PS: Thanks to Wikipedia, for example, I learned that philosopher of science Susan Oyama has been married to the late great contemporary composer Luciano Berio from 1966 to 1972. Pretty interesting …

* I should point out that Mirowski is not referring to David Warsh here but to Paul Krugman, though his using the plural of “experts” is quite intriguing.

Dear Yann,

I hope these words find you in good health and high spirits. [to add: short funny and self deprecating story about myself]

I write you to collect your thoughts on a puzzle that has bothered me in the last few days. Some of the newspaper websites that I visit regularly have called on their readers to send “images of the recession.” National Public Radio’s Planet Money has collected in bulk over 300 pictures in flickr. The UK Guardian has a recession monitor, also in flickr, introduced frantically “So it looks like we’re in a recession, or heading for one. Or are we? How do we know? We want to see your shots of how the recession is (or isn’t) affecting your area.” Finally, the New York Times has not outsourced and hosts “Picturing the Recession” with some cool flash enabled browsing. I recall our conversations about the FSA photographs and discussing Cara Finnegan’s book Picturing Poverty on that same topic. These are items of visual culture as you are fond of calling them, and I of echoing. I wondered if you had noticed this phenomena and if you see how one can speak meaningfully about it.

Cynically, I see these as mostly gimmicks to draw people to web content and give them a stake of ownership. The websites and the newspapers make no direct use of the readers’ photographs, I found no references to these besides the appeals for more. It does not help newsprint in imagining the economy as the FSA photographs did by design. What do you think we can draw from these? May they tell us something about popular culture? If these are clues, what is the mystery?

[to add: tangent about some of the photographs, and so cool down the letter]

With best regards,
[to add: my name]

P.S. [to add: joke about recipe of cod and fava beans...]

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?

Or when Will Thomas from the Etherwave blog is commenting on Ivan Moscati’s piece on the future of HET in the JHET : here.

Engaging narratives in the early twenty first century are visual. One picks up in early paragraph colours, spaces, movement of objects and people. It is unpoetic but fast paced as a thriller, consider Simon Schama or the other popular historians. The style opens up history as comic, as cartoon, as black and white flash animation. And an impossible history, history of evil, turns out to be not half bad…

I don’t know how rarely it is that a Nobel Prize winner has a piece published in a magazine that is devoted to pop culture in the larger sense of the term – I guess Playboy may have published that kind of stuff, too, and I also understand that Krugman has already published a few anti-Bush articles in RS before he received the Nobel-Prize -, but here it is in the last issue of Rolling Stone: Paul Krugman’s advice to the new President.

I will not comment the article to a large extent and want to leave it for your consideration. However, I have just two or three remarks. It is quite striking that Krugman cites a lot of politicians but not one economist (not even Keynes) to strengthen his argument. He doesn’t even cites his sources when he provides figures (though he refers to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities at the beginning of his article). It strikes me, but doesn’t hurt me, either … after all, Krugman is known as a sharp columnist by a large audience and a columnist is not supposed to cite any technical material or refer to the state of the art in the discipline he writes about. That is fine, except that Krugman is not presented by RS as the New York Times columnist but as the “Nobel-Prize-winning economist” who “examines the profound challenges facing [the] new president” (my emphasis). Should his new Prize give him a different kind of authority and then responsibility as an economic writer? I was having a look at a small paperback volume called Economics From The Heart: A Samuelson Sampler and it shows that Samuelson’s columns in Newsweek were far less polemical and often referred to some economists (his colleague Robert Solow, but also his former  teacher at Harvard Alvin Hansen, as well as the alternative Newsweek columnist, Milton Friedman). Whereas Samuelson’s columns aimed at showing the powers of economics as a prescriptive science, Krugman harshly criticizes Bush’s economics (and even goes further at the end of his article) and, like many other polemicists, invokes the Great Depression as the example everybody must look at to solve the current crisis (two pictures that are not reproduced in the electronic version of RS emphasize this parallel).

A few weeks ago, I saw Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC Morning Joe, calling Krugman a “very hateful guy” who is “weighed down by his Nobel Prize”. It seems that Krugman’s turning into a political pundit doesn’t please much his new colleagues.

PS: I think I should say something about the comic strip above. It is called “This Modern World” and is drawn by Tom Tomorrow, the pen name of editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins. This cartoon is regularly published in The Independant Weekly, a liberal tabloid distributed throughout the Durham-Raleigh area. This is not the first time I see Krugman being mentioned in it.

It has some sprinkles of Cold War and hints that models of networking information competed, yet, it feels so “whiggish.” It is a shame that not all nerds are angels.

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.

The results of the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK will come out Friday 18th. The suspense is substantial. From midnight today there will be blogging on how to read the data at this site. Given all this intricate staging and delays, I wonder if the sky will fall on Friday.

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