Last year I pointed out here (and here) that macroeconomists were making themselves comfortable in the blogosphere to discuss theoretical, methodological, and, why not, historical issues of their field (see also a nice post by our fellow kid, Beatrice). It is indeed interesting that they find blogs as a good outlet for this kind of discussion: there seems to be a ring of making timely interventions on a present-day discussion, but this inevitably comes with a more informal tone and no academic requirements — one can express his own ideas more freely, give his own personal testimony perhaps in a non-systematic way, without being required to be a scholar when pointing out a past development of an idea or argument. It is true that macroeconomists, as microeconomists mostly do, blog also about “applied” topics (economic policy, growth, inequality, etc.). But, as I pointed out, you find much more blog discussion involving the history (and methodology) of macroeconomics, than of microeconomics.
The challenges and opportunities that come with economists turning to history (rewriting it, “co-opting” it) in a time of flux using, unlike a generation ago, a short-attention-span technology such as blogs, motivated me to organize a roundtable at the last History of Economics Society (HES) meeting, in Montreal. I invited a group of historians and a macroeconomist (not necessarily active bloggers, some of whom I unsuccessfully tried to get involved into this) to reflect on all this: Steve Ambler (Université du Québec à Montréal), Kevin Hoover (Duke University), Marcel Boumans (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam), and myself. I finally bring this short video with some highlights of the discussion to the blogosphere, were it belongs (this is a long overdue post; my apologies). Enjoy!
