Archive

Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day.

Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on.

In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.

Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity

Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (or UK ‘finance minister’) gave his annual budget speech where UK fiscal policy is set for the coming years.

In his notorious “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists’ inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts.

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)

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 recent years, an increasingly significant part of the history of economics has modeled itself after the methodologies developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars.

So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.

So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.