On December 6-7, 1968, a Symposium on the History of Economic Thought was held at Duke University. The purpose of the symposium was to induce an initial flow of manuscripts in order to launch a new journal, History of Political Economy. It was hoped that the new Journal would “become a stimulus to all parts of this field of study, a source of encouragement to scholars, and a forum for students in the subject in many lands and ages.”
(…)
At the same symposium, the participants expressed an interest in an annual history-of-thought session at the meetings of the American Economic Association. The interest of the group was conveyed to Professor Leontief, the president-elect, who welcomed the idea. Subsequently, such a session was organized by Professor Spengler and held during the New York meetings of the Association, December 1969. The session was successful; it was attended by approximately 125 persons, even though it was scheduled for 8:30 A.M. That session was the first in the field to appear on the program of the American Economic Association since 1964. A second session, held at the annual meetings of the Association in 1970, was also consequence of our efforts. Although it was scheduled for 8:30 A.M., it was attended by about 250 persons. We hope to continue to have sessions in the future.

This excerpt is from Vincent J. Tarascio “Some Recent Developments in the History of Economic Thought in the United States” History of Political Economy, 3(2): 419-431. I hereby file my complaint that past HOPE volumes are not yet digitized. If I were not at Duke I might not have been able to read and cite from them.

According to Google Scholar, the An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations has been cited 4751 times and the short and less pedantic title of Wealth of Nations cited 3229. Capitalism and Freedom has 3345 registered cites, the Road to Serfdom has 1599, and Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities amasses 1107.

But the top title is The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money cited 5800 cites (now 58001, … 58002). They cite it, but who reads it?

The CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - National Center for Scientific Research) has just published in June 2008 his revised ranking of journals in economics (it is important to note that, in principle at least, only the journals that are publishing mostly in the economics area are ranked). This ranking is significant since most of the French universities and research institutions in economics are using it as their principal tool to assess the quality of candidates. Journals are set in several sub-fields, such as for example “Agricultural, Environmental and Energy Economics” or “History of Economic Thought, Economic History, Methodology”. The ranking is set in 5 categories: category 1* is for top general journals (like AER), category 1 is for top journal is each sub-category (HOPE in History of economics), and so on to category 4. The ranking is made by the economics section of the national commitee of the CNRS after a long process of expertise and reporting by both French and international scholars.

What is odd is that this ranking, first published in 2004, had already been revised in October 2007. We were not expecting another round of revision before 2010. Why things went differently this time? This is where it gets interesting. The ranking of 2004 was the first of its kind. Some publishers and chief-editors might have been at that time unhappy with the ranking of their journals, but since nothing had never been done that looks like it, they had very few arguments to induce the national committee of the CNRS to modify ex-post the ranking, so it went unchanged for three years. The ranking of 2007 was a very different thing: while several journals did not move rank, some were upgraded, some were downgraded. The first ones were quite happy about the changes while the latter were sore. What they did is quite simple, they campaigned to have their journals restored to their “natural rights”. The consequence was that several of the downgraded Journals from 2007 were reintalled in their previous categoryin the June 2008 ex-post revised ranking. Moreover, the experts chosen by the CNRS to make the 2007 ranking were not associated with the ex-post revision, which was obviously implemented at a higher and more political level.

In the HET category, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (from category 1 to category 2) and Les Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (previously category 1, moved out of the ranking) were among the losers in October 2007. They were both reinstated in their previous rankings thanks to active campaigning from the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (for the EJHET) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (for the Annales). It is interesting to note that in either cases, these institutions are not formely linked to these journals, although they have a long history together. Moreover, these two institutions have chosen to campaign for their champion at the expense of other likely candidates: the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (which stayed in category 2 in all rankings, the Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine which never integrated the ranking).

Using the tools of the historian of economics, this can be subject to two rough interpretations. First, the EJHET more focused program of research on HET as contributing to economic theory or at least interacting closely with recent economics is better science than the more open (in particular to SSK and contextual history) approach devised by the JHET. Second, Georges Stigler was wrong and the inner scientific quality of scientific programs says very little of the actual reasons why some individual or group of theories and scientists (and journals in this case) gets more scientific credit than others (I like this one better).

Footnote: the issue of the CNRS ranking of journals is of particular pertinence to the participants of this blog since it influences the choices of young researchers in submitting to one or another journal as well as having a differential impact on the careers of those who are publishing in the EJHET versus those who are publishing in the JHET (or any history of economics’ journal).

Here you can find the three different rankings:

http://www.gate.cnrs.fr/spip.php?rubrique31

This being a “visual world and I am a visual kid” I twist and turn every night thinking of the graphics to include in my slides, be that for the professional seminar or for the teaching lecture. In times of hurry I have always looked at the New School for Social Research who’s who of the history of economics it has a few pics and links which sometimes work. The website is updated in content but it looks as it did in 2000, if not before, which in web years is like 8 times 15, over a century… The HOPE group at Duke hosts the Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection which has a lot of useful mugs. But if one wants a more broadly themed illustration, one must scavenge personal digital archive, go to Corbis at a price, or, check this site: Picture History; a decent database for social, political, business, and all other histories. The shame is that the pics are watermarked.

The controversy over the New Yorker cover is an interesting case study of how culture reads culture. The critics of the cover object to the representation of Barack and Michelle as extremists of Black Power and Islam. The association is a falsehood, although one that some news media will sometimes insinuate to feed punditry. The trouble is that the medium of the representation was not the news media with its normative claim to objectivity. It was what the New Yorker calls a cartoon.

Since there is a wide range of visuals that fall under the heading of cartoon, we are steeped in murky semiotic waters. The critics and the supporters of the cover distributed themselves into two camps. The critics called the cartoon a caricature. The supporters called the cartoon a satire. Hence the debate turned ontological: an agreement ought to be reached on what the thing is. A caricature purports to enhance certain aspects of reality, and by bringing the hidden into focus, it can claim a measure of objectivity. A satire serves not the purpose of truth and faithful representation, it seeks the absurd by bringing an argument to its excessive conclusions.

The controversy about the cover is no longer about the cover. The new subject is the legitimate social sphere of satire. Fine and dandy to have New Yorker magazines delivered in the mailbox of the intellectual classes (like me, who have yet to receive this issue, and losing hope of ever getting such an incendiary item). Not so nice to have New Yorker magazines in newsstands since the public is ignorant of subtlety and will subscribe to whatever meets their eyes.

Does studying the aspirations, fears and utopias of past economists and of the societies they lives in (working on “social engineering” stirs this recurrent question) give us any special ability to understand the zeitgeist, trends and salient features of our time?

A few weeks ago, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, predicted the end of scientific method (“hypotheses-model-test”). He argued that the combination of data analysis and of the advent the petabyte age, where it is possible to store and analyze an unimaginable quantity of data, always false models will be replaced with data crunching. “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” he confidently asserted.

While acknowledging that correlation was -hitherto- not causation, he nevertheless claimed, on the basis of the gene sequencing experience, that:

Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

The comments below the article and elsewhere on the web (here in French, there in English for instance) are much more interesting than the post in itself, whose main interest is to warn about the drifting of overconfidence in data analysis. The discussions on the problem of inductivism, the true meaning of correlation, the context and applications of models etc. are pretty interesting, especially when they resurrect the Friedman idea that prediction is what matters or display overtones of the Koopmans-Vining debate.

Chris Anderson was trained in Physics, his biography says. I wonder whether such article could have been written by an economist. If only because the economist’s approach to data.

“Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age,”

Anderson begins with. But it seems to me that economists are not even done with the first step, “ma[ke] information readable.” The history of econometrics can be read as a long and difficult quest to cope with missing data, outliers, spurious correlation, endogeneity etc. And the today economic articles I most admire are those where shrewd proxies for missing data sets are designed, such as the –controversial- use of streams as a proxy for the number of school districts to test the benefits of public school choices, or the use of nineteenth century Prussian census data to test the Weberian relation between Protestantism and prosperity (thanks Mathieu).

People keep asking me whether my work is internalist, externalist, or a bit of both (neither doesn’t seem to be an option). I confess here and now that I never really know what the difference is between the two. Internalist to me refers to being or remaining within something, externalist must have to do with outside that something. But then I can’t figure out what that something is. From the way these questions are posed I gather that that something must be somehow externally defined. That is, it seems that I can’t decide myself whether a particular argument or story-line is internal or external. However, there’s no authority to be found defining that something that consitutes the inside. Help me out here guys, what is or could be the difference?

The picture is from the cover of Business Week of the 31st of March 2008 “Reluctant Revolutionary” issue. Since then the spotlight has not moved away from the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, as the economy swings between statements of paranoid alarm and insincere reassurance.

There are plenty of histories of the Federal Reserve System, with plenty of experts battling for the right to speak for it. But I would like to know if there is anything about the Fed in the public imagination.

It seems to me that since Volcker, if not since McChesney Martin, the Fed Chair has been awarded a papal status. He is subject to strident abuse (enter Jim Cramer) and praise, but overwhelmingly the Chairman is trusted without question, dare I say it: respected. In troubled times, criticism is notably mute. The economy is like a nervous and unreliable creature, and the most important public virtues are detached calm and bullishness. The Fed Chairman embodies virtue.