Excerpts from "Retrospect and Prospect," the concluding remarks Bob Coats presented at (or maybe wrote after) the History of Economics conference held in 1972 at Bellagio to commemorate and reassess the 1870s "marginal revolution" (full proceedings here).  

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Yesterday, I had my first introductory economics seminar with my new students. At the end of this 4-hour marathon, which included the definition of economics and some preliminary knowledge on methodology, economic history and the history of the discipline, one of my students, who, I had noticed, stared at me quite incredulously during my speech, approached me and asked me in an aside: "Mr. Giraud, have you read the Shock Doctrine?". Read more

Mid August, with the Olympics over, Paralympics and Premiership starting (that's Soccer for the American readership), it is well and truly the quiet period for most of academia.

But now is also the time for conference announcements (for the next season) and I just discovered that the History of Economics Society will have four sessions at the 2013 year's ASSA, featuring fellow bloggers Tiago and Yann.  Read more

The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) recently published the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, in which the authors propose a measure of wealth based on the stock of capital present in a country, as opposed to the flow measure of GDP. It is an important step towards a more explicit recognition of the sustainability of the economy’s use of resources, and is so obviously analogous to the standard assets-based way of accounting and estimating wealth in the corporate sector that one wonders why on earth it took so long to appear on the scene. Read more