History

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.

This research project offers a radical reconsideration of the centrality of the Corn Returns to the development of classical liberal political economy and shows how much the Corn Laws enriched agrarian interests and how their repeal represented a boost to British manufacturing.

This research project examines how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that into mathematics.

This research project documents long-run trends in personal bankruptcy, with special emphasis on the use of the bankruptcy law at the local level and among women.

My friend read somewhere that the experience of death makes people think in philosophical terms. He might have thought of religion rather than philosophy, I replied. We agreed, and wandered off talking about our crypto-religious experiences in good old secular Europe.

On November 2nd, I was sitting in the Hayden Library Special Collection reading room at MIT, browsing archives on the undergraduate and graduate students’ discontent during the early 70s and the response of the economics department faculty.