Archive

Mid August, with the Olympics over, Paralympics and Premiership starting (that’s Soccer for the American readership), it is well and truly the quiet period for most of academia.

If the meetings of European historians of economics are urbane and cosmopolitan, the meetings of American historians are, by contrast, frank and toilful.

The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) recently published the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, in which the authors propose a measure of wealth based on the stock of capital present in a country, as opposed to the flow measure of GDP.

A few weeks ago, I attended the H2S 4th workshop on “Cross disciplinary ventures in postwar American Social Sciences,” (research program outline here).

Last weekend, I was in Tübingen - very close to my home town: the same smell, the same surreal Swabian idyll that makes you think of Hölderlin and Hesse rather than DSGE.

A few days ago, I began researching on the history of a subfield of economics which was born in the sixties, then thrived and institutionalized itself in the early seventies.

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

“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.”

This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years.

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.

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.

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].”

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.

Ivan Moscati is one of the most exciting voices in the historiography of decision theory.

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.