scholarly journals “Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Economists and Their Travels, or the Time When JFK Sent Douglass North on a Mission to Brazil”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Boianovsky

The role of traveling as a source of discovery and development of new ideas has been controversial in the history of economics. Despite their protective attitude toward established theory, economists have traveled widely and gained new insights or asked new questions as a result of their exposition to “other” economic systems, ideas and forms of behavior. That is particularly the case when they travel to new places while their frameworks are in their initial stages or undergoing changes. This essay examines economists’ traveling as a potential source of new hypotheses, from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with a detailed case study of Douglass North’s 1961 travel to Brazil.

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Boianovsky

The role of traveling as a source of discovery and development of new ideas has been controversial in the history of economics. Despite their protective attitude toward established theory, economists have traveled widely and gained new insights or asked new questions as a result of their exposure to “other” economic systems, ideas, and forms of behavior. That is particularly the case when they travel to new places while their frameworks are in their initial stages or undergoing changes. This essay examines economists’ traveling as a potential source of new hypotheses, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a detailed case study of Douglass North’s 1961 travel to Brazil.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 991-1011
Author(s):  
Diogo Lourenço ◽  
Mário Graça Moura

Abstract Tony Lawson’s writings, including those in the history of economics, have an ontological orientation. Several scholars influenced by him likewise practice an ontologically oriented history of economic thought. However, the programme for this sort of history has not been explicitly articulated. In the present paper, we argue that Lawson’s The nature of heterodox economics contains implicitly an ontologically oriented programme in the history of economic thought. We also illustrate the achievements of this programme by reviewing the writings on the later Austrians by Lawson and his associates. Finally, we assess the programme and its achievements in the light of Lawson’s comments on the importance of doing social-scientific ontology and doing history of economic thought.


Author(s):  
Dr. Anand Shanker Singh

There are many possible approaches to organizing economic activities of individuals living in social systems. Whatever method is chosen, it is necessary to coordinate or integrate the behavior of individual members of the society. The history of economic thought is a study of the more important attempts to analyze, describe and explain the relationships in actual or idealized economic systems. Knowledge of alternative explanations of economic processes provides a basis for evaluating the performance of industrial economies. It also provides a basis for critically evaluating economic theories and models that purport to describe modern industrial economies


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Bach

In this article, I argue that looking at lesser known intellectuals can help history of economics uncover news ways of seeing the world. My focus is the beginnings of “Indian Economics” and its conceptualization of development. The Indian economists, despite their elite status in India, were from an imperial context where they were never considered economists. Studies throughout the 20th century continued to treat them only as nationalists, rarely as contributors to economic knowledge. My research gives agency to these economists. I show how the position of Indian Economics from the margins of discursive space offered a unique perspective that enabled it to discursively innovate at the margins of development discourse. Indian Economics redefined the concept of universality in the existing 19th century idea of development by rejecting the widely accepted comparative advantage model and assertion that progress originated in Europe. Moreover, the economists pushed for universal industrialization, even for imperial territories, arguing that universal progress was beneficial to all.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth John Button

This paper is concerned with examining the role of the English economist Arthur (A.J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-change unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’ 1958 paper, and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation, and his later work on inflation, has received much less. Here the focus is on redressing somewhat this situation by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’ paper, and what differences there are to it. We also considers this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’ analysis, and in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heba Ezzeldin Helmy

In this article, the author provides motivation in allocating a new formative Pecha Kucha (PK) presentation assignment on one economic school of thought to groups of students in a History of Economic Thought (HET) course. Each group would then post its PK on the Moodle course forum and comment on other PK presentations. The assignment was aimed at engaging students more with technology; in learning on their own, with each other and from each other; in acquiring abstracting skills; in addressing the breadth rather than only the depth of learning; and in making use of the brevity of PK in shortening the long history of economics. The author expounds the advantages and limitations of this assignment in addition to its applicability in other courses.


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