History of Economic Thought

Paul Davidson - What Goes Around Comes Around 3/4

In the third part of this four-part INET "From the Director's Chair" interview, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson talks with Journal of Post Keynesian Economics co-founder Paul Davidson about Davidson's book The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity.

Davidson examines the current economic problems in Europe and admonishes Germany for forgetting Keynes's truism that debtors' problems are creditors' problems too. To show how bolstering the Greek economy is in Germany's interests, Davidson points to the Marshall Plan as an example of how a major government investment was able to help solve a similar problem after World War II.

Paul Davidson - Keynes's Forgotten Lessons 1/4

In the first part of this four-part INET "From the Director's Chair" interview, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson talks with Journal of Post Keynesian Economics co-founder Paul Davidson about Davidson's book The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity.

Davidson discusses Keynes's oft-forgotten insights into the foundational assumptions of economics. Classical economists were treated as "Euclidians in a non-Euclidian world," Davidson says. "When they saw parallel lines intersecting they rebuked them for intersecting." Keynes saw that the problem with Euclidean economics was what he called uncertainty, meaning the idea that the future cannot be predicted from the past -- an insight that modern economics too often ignores.

Leakage as historiographic genre @ HES 2012

 

[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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Posted by Tiago Mata at 10:27 am

The Visible Hand Writing History

[We are inaugurating something new in this blog: a jointly written post!]

  Let’s propose an exercise (simplistic in many dimensions). Read the following abstract of a paper and decide whether or not it looks publishable in either A) a top economics journal or B) a top history of economics journal? Read more

Posted by Pedro G Duarte at 5:29 am

Economics and computation in the postwar period: managing scarcity

 

“We choose this stochastic structure for computational reasons. This reduces the dimension of the variables. With (such and such) alternative, the computational burden would have dramatically increased.”

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Posted by Beatrice Cherrier at 8:43 pm

Economics at Chicago, 1939-1955: the scope of our ignorance

The University of Chicago is well-known for as the place where a famous group of economists, including Milton Friedman, Georges Stigler, Gary Becker, among others, developed a method for analyzing economic facts based on Marshallian price theory, a vision of the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates called monetarism, and an approach to individual liberties and the role of the state known as (neo)liberalism. In the recent years, historians of economics have researched more carefully the apparent consistency, the institutionalization and the reasons for the success of this community, highlithing the contested influence of neocon foundations and Read more

Posted by Beatrice Cherrier at 9:22 pm

Division of labour was common knowledge by the 1770s

I always think of Adam Smith when I hear the term 'division of labour' - but I'm being cured of this by reading a bit more about Britains late 18th century in Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men. A very good read on industrialists and doctors, it remarks on Matthew Boulton's (think steam engine / manufacturing) explanation to Lord Warwick (in 1773) that it is ithe seperation of processes which allow British manufacturers to compete with continental Europe. So Adam Smith's comments were not so much brilliant discovery, but rather explanation of well established fact: Read more

Posted by Benjamin Mitra-Kahn at 9:23 am

History of Economics Journals in SSCI - a correction

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

Posted by Tiago Mata at 9:55 am

Between science and history

Last Friday, philosophers from the University of Leiden hosted the symposium ‘Between Science and History,’ in an attempt to figure out what the differences are between practicing scientists’ use of history and historians use of history. The organizers had conjured up the nice experiment of letting a scientist and a historian in one session give a talk on a famous historical figure – Einstein, Darwin, Christiaan Huygens. (Plus there were a few idiosyncratic talks, interesting in other respects, but let me leave those out here.) Read more

Posted by Floris Heukelom at 10:13 am

Three questions to Ivan Moscati: Historicizing Choice Theory

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

Posted by Tiago Mata at 4:21 pm