Tiago Mata's blog

[This post was written three weeks ago on antiquated in to paper media and it has taken me this long to post it online. ]

If the meetings of European historians of economics are urbane and cosmopolitan, the meetings of American historians are, by contrast, frank and toilful. The setting is often rural. Our 2012 host was Brock University in Ontario’s wine country. We were treated to a liquid dinner at the concluding banquet. To my taste the wines were sweet and light, though my palate lacks the lexicon to report the experience in full.

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In a recent post I wrote: "I am sure it will not take long before Journal of the History of Economic Thought (Cambridge Uni. Press) makes that list [Thompson Reuters, Social Science Citation Index]." I was wrong, the journal has made the list. The error is compounded because History of Economic Ideas is also on SSCI. Read more

Ivan Moscati is one of the most exciting voices in the historiography of decision theory. In 2007 he took the field by surprise with two important, widely cited, and deservingly prize winning articles: Early Experiments in Consumer Demand Theory, 1930-1970; and History of Consumer Demand Theory: 1930-1970. Read more

Steven Shapin is visiting the UK. For those unfamiliar with the history and sociology of science, he is one of the giants of the field. From the 1970s he has been in the thick of the action: a protagonist in the making and affirmation of the Edinburgh School; making the study of place and practice central features of the concerns and efforts of historians of science. He has always been ahead, leading, shaping (pardon the pun).   Read more

My attempt at a double riddle. "I find familiar faces only in unfamiliar places. Who am I? And whom are the faces?" The answer to the first is, I am an academic, to the second, my conference buddies.  Read more

Judy Klein is Professor of Economics at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She is the author of Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis 1662-1938, (Cambridge 1997) and co-editor of The Age of Economic Measurement (Duke 2001), and co-author of The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (in preparation). She has been a research fellow/visiting scholar at the National Humanities Center, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the École normale supérieure de Cachan, and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science. Read more

I am writing from my notes. The event I want to report took place some two months ago, I have since been preoccupied, then occupied, and now increasingly overwhelmed. In the rooms of the Washington Duke Inn sat some 20 economists, philosophers, historians and methodologists, discussing "herding behavior" in the economics profession. I have been to several of similar events and they are spottingly attended, with folks coming in and out of the room, physically and mentally. Not so this time. Read more

[The following text was sent to us by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, we reproduce it in its entirety.] Read more

The transatlantic conference has been moving targets: sociology went first, then economics, then history, today it was political science and international relations. While sociologists and economists had a muscular dialogue on the first day, quickly resolved over lunch with familiar scholarly ethic. The historians closed the day, soft spoken and monorcordic reading their speeches but dropping a bomb: the global public sphere is gone, and there is no longer a past, just an extended present with everyone obsessed with personal, ethnic, identitary history but no real curiosity beyond. So it was appropriate that political scientists try something else, and abandoning the public sphere altogether the discussion today has been about the crises of the University. Read more

It's not everyday that one finds economists using history as not just the right way but the only way to answer a question. History is informative, at times entertaining, but not a device for knowledge. And then it all depends on the question. In Berlin, the conversation is how to make social sciences more relevant and active in the public sphere?

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