History

The INET roundtable on “new conversations and the academy” took place a week ago. Most panelists were bloggers, including Mike Konczal from RortyBomb and Noah Smith from Noahopinion.

A recent e-mail conversation I had with Harro Maas concerning one of my latest drafts (shameless self-promotion) made me buy and read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s, Merchants of Doubts.

The following text was sent to us by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, we reproduce it in its entirety.

Professors Roger Backhouse and Brad Bateman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days ago, arguing that “thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found” - we have stopped thinking big they say.

This is the question I’m supposed to answer for an experimental INET conference aimed at inspiring new thinking through interdisciplinary conversation and collective reflection without rules.

In the case of utility, it’s all in the name.

Till is right. It’s not the historian’s task to question the legitimacy of the decisions of the Nobel Committee.

It’s Nobel Prize time again. And what a beautiful prize this year it is!

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.