Beatrice Cherrier's blog

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To illustrate the previous post on the difficulties in putting together a chronology, here is tentative chronology of economics at Carnegie. It's still in process, and links, sources and entries will be updated as I read. Read more

This year, I'm sharing an office with an econometrician on Mondays and with a geographer on Fridays (you don't want to go into the subtleties of the French educational system). We're discussing the content of our research and the strengths and weaknesses in our respective methodologies, and, of course, joking and complaining about the sociology of our communities. Read more

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The notion of “field” is so pervasive that economists hardly pay conscious attention to it. The student is early trained into the habit of classifying knowledge, then papers and colleagues according to their field. You share your office with a labor economist, will be part of a committee recruiting some health economist, and are late with your review of this environmental economics paper (well, that's unlikely). Economic fields draw a map with which economists navigate their profession on a daily basis. Read more

Although the objectivity-Grail Quest has ended with total success decades ago (so economists say), the question of the possibility and consequences of economists' values smuggling into their daily practice still periodically surfaces, and crises make good times for such debates. Yet, not often do we historians too ask how economists' values should be handled in our writing. Read more

Edit 04/11: meeting of mind. there was a session on just the same topic yesterday at the Kilkeconomics festival, by Peter Antonioni. If any visitor attended, please complement or summarize what was said there.  Read more

When they told me I was expected to teach “Introduction à l'économie” this year, I thought, OK, this is straight. Every economist knows how to do that. If not, he will be wisened up after swallowing 50 pounds of Mankiw/Stiglitz-Walsh textbooks, where he will learn everything about how economics has evolved, from the science of how wealth is produced to the science of rational choice under scarcity. Read more

Excerpts from a draft introduction of Till Düppe's and Roy Weintraub's new book, under revision for Princeton University Press, presently carrying the working title "Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Transformation of Economic Theory

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