Beatrice Cherrier

Jedi by day, wanabee historian of economics by night. 

Battlefield: Initially studied some postwar economists' writings and intimate worldviews. Now trying to figure out how and under which influences those idiosyncratic visions confront, compromise and combine into groups, departments, schools, institutions, communities, subdisciplines and eventually economics as a science, a public object, a culture. Current case study: economics at MIT. 

Favorite weapon: archive work. Looking at oral history with terror and at new methods such as network analysis with awe and a tint of skepticism

Strategy: writing history of economics not only as a history of theorizing but also as a tale of educating, recruiting, funding, advising, engineering, applying, popularizing, fighting, talking, reading, hearing, innovating, failing, etc.

Looking for: Fun, feedback and suggestions

Academic identification: more information here.

My Additional Content

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...

 

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...

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...

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...

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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