Posts have been all-too-rare of late. Work related to my fellowship with the American Council on Education, and holiday festivities, ate up the month of December. Since most stories relating to the history of economic ideas aren't exactly time-sensitive, I figure this won't be terribly problematical for anyone out there. ;-) After all, one of my graduate macro professors at the UofT, Angelo Melino, told me to hold off doing the history of economics until I was 65 or thereabouts. He saw me drinking wine by a cosy fire, reflecting on the history of economic ideas in retirement. As he put it, "they're all dead guys", so why rush to write up what they said? Why ruin my career in economics by choosing this field that could wait some 40 years for whatever I had to say?
Was Angelo right? Did I (and a few others I know) make a mistake by choosing to bury myself in this very small segment of the economics profession? Angelo may have had a point (though it's not the one he meant to make) -- it may be that as one has more time to read and reflect, one writes better pieces in the history of economic ideas. I've come more fully to understand the significance of (say) J. S. Mill or T. R. Malthus only after reading and rereading them, along with a great deal of contextual material. Whether that's as true of other fields in economics or not, is another question.
But secondly, I've come to see that the history of economic ideas is in fact much more woven into our day-to-day lives than I might have imagined, earlier on. Tonight, I have in mind the idea of "experts" -- economic or otherwise -- and ordinary people. Specifically, recent reports of major scientific fraud related to cloning research:
When Dr. Hwang Woo Suk's recent reports of advances in cloning research were declared to have been fabricated on Friday, his disgrace left scientists wondering how he had risen so fast, deceived so many and fallen so hard.
The NYTimes account is here.
What does the Hwang or any other story about scientific fraud have to do with the history of economic ideas or economics more generally? Economists in our past have had important things to say about the incentives faced by experts. But since we no longer know economists who wrote in the past, most of us are at a loss to find texts or analyses in economics that address this issue. Yet economists, who write about incentives and economic man (including scientists), should be at the forefront of examining the incentives faced by scientists and the outcomes we might expect from those incentives. And there's a great deal of historical material that bears on the issue, related but not limited to eugenics and eugenic "evidence" that passed muster among social scientists. One of the major thrusts of the Vanity of the Philosopher, is that the past provides a cautionary tale for all of us who consider ourselves to be "experts" of some sort.
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