History

This one is different. Tiago, Benjamin and Floris have asked a dozen economists in the Bretton Woods hotel hall to reflect on the way their teaching has been affected by the current economic crisis and their answers, taken collectively, are quite puzzling.

I cannot resist but to start quoting Mary Morgan’s second entry to the second edition of the New Palgrave: “Modeling became the dominant methodology of economics during the 20th century.”

I thought I could use some of my illegitimate blog administrator’s privileges to participate in the discussion on the “progress in economics” post by Floris without being lost in the midst of other users’ comments.

Ok, time to deal with the elephant in the room: when is one theory better than the other? What is progress in economics?

The transatlantic conference has been moving targets: sociology went first, then economics, then history, today it was political science and international relations.

It’s not everyday that one finds economists using history as not just the right way but the only way to answer a question.

Our interviews in the halls of the Mount Washington Hotel, covered the range of opinion about the severity of conflicts of interest in economics: we are alright; economics is no more corrupted than other sciences; corruption is substantial; it is rotten to the core.

The Marshall Lectures often provide thought provoking talks and one talk in particular spoke to me looking at the relationship between history and economics:

Last June at a History of Social Science workshop , David Engerman presented a paper on the Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project (1950-1954).

On this blog, we like to overstate quite a bit our irreverence towards the establishment and in particular our senior colleagues.

To celebrate its 100 years of publishing, the AER published a special issues, whose retrospective part consisted of a list of the 20 most important articles, assembled by a committee which included Kenneth J. Arrow, B. Douglas Bernheim, Martin S. Feldstein, Daniel L. McFadden, James M. Poterba, and Robert M. Solow, and an essay on the history of the AER by Robert A. Margo.

Months ago, I got a message from a friend that was a swift and excited line: Errol Morris was writing a series of posts about science, even more remarkable about Thomas Kuhn.

Economics and politics go hand in hand, we all know that.

INET is all about thinking new things, and indeed academia is supposed to inspire great thoughts.

As part of the tremendous promotion campaign for the 8th edition of his textbook Economics, Samuelson was devoted a feature in the New York Times (February 5, 1970, p. 41).