|
History of Economic Thought
First Day
Information
Cards
Why Study History of Thought?
-
Basic literacy in economics.
- Dispel misconceptions about
famous economists (Smith, Marx, Keynes, and others) that are
widely believed, but untrue. This is important, because the
supposed ideas of classical authors are often used as "proof
texts" in current debates. As Josh Billings (not
Mark Twain), a humorist, put it in about 1872, "It is
better not to know so much, than to know so many things that
ain't so."
-
Learn economic doctrines in their
historical and ethical context (i.e., Corn Laws)
-
"A man who has looked into
an economics textbook and concluded that economics
is boring is like a man who has read a primer on
logistics and decided that the study of warfare must
be dull."
Robert Heilbroner,
The Worldly Philosophers
- Rejection of an
overly"positivist" approach to knowledge and discovery that
has been rejected by most philosophers and scientists:
-
Bruce Caldwell: "A bedrock belief of positivism is
that all real sciences are cumulatively progressive, that
slowly but surely within science errors are discarded and
a widely accepted body of knowledge is created. This view
leads naturally to the belief that an understanding of the
history of a discipline is simply irrelevant for a
scientist, because all knowledge is contained in the most
recent working papers. History is for antiquarians and
hobbyists, not for real scientists. [In the 1920s,
Wesley Mitchell observed that this was a problem in the
natural sciences, but not economics]
If alternative accounts of how science is actually pursued
that emerged in the wake of positivism’s demise are
correct, then the idea that science develops linearly and
progressively is simply false. Historians and philosophers
of science like Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos offered the
initial alternatives to the positivist view, in the
process demonstrating that the history of the natural
sciences is a much messier affair than previously thought,
that no hard and fast criteria for theory choice exist,
and that scientific disciplines change emphases and
approaches for a host of reasons, both internal and
external, that require examination.
-
See that economics is not a fixed set of
"revealed truths." It continues to change, and it's path
dependent:
-
Mark Blaug: "No idea or theory in economics,
physics, chemistry,
biology, philosophy and even mathematics is ever
thoroughly understood except as the end-product of a
slice of history, the result of some previous
intellectual development... I never understood the
Keynesian Revolution until I read Hayek's tortured
Prices and Production (1931) and Robbins's confusing
explanation of The Great Depression (1934). So it is,
I think, with all economic theories. Economic
knowledge is path-dependent. What we now know about
the economic system is not something we have just
discovered, but it is the sum of all discoveries,
insights and false starts in the past. Without Hayek
and Robbins and Pigou, no Keynes; without Keynes, no
Friedman; without Friedman, no Lucas; without Lucas,
no ..."
- In fact, history itself (or
the knowledge of it) is not fixed. Consider, for example,
the fairly recent revelations of the Tulsa Massacre.
-
Don’t forget what’s already known when
attention moves from one hot-button issue to another.
-
Explore
origins of our own “practical” ideas
-
“Practical men who believe themselves to be exempt
from any intellectual influences are usually the
slaves of some defunct economist.”
John Maynard Keynes,
The General Theory...
- It has been a Baylor Tradition
(1851 Baylor Bulletin):
-
|
