Making the Case for Equitable Growth: Comments on the 2020 David Gordon Memorial Lecture

In this piece, I comment on Heather Boushey’s David Gordon Memorial Lecture at the 2020 Allied Social Science Association meetings in San Diego. I identify the theory of change presented in Boushey’s lecture and discuss it in the context of contemporary economic thought. I argue that Boushey’s theory of change makes an important normative intervention in economics science. I evaluate Boushey’s theory of change from the perspective of philosophy of science as well as drawing on historical evidence.

Forging a Gender Path in Modern Mexican History

In 1975, Richard Graham asked me to give a paper on Mexican women at the Southwestern Social Science Association meeting. Surely, he asked me only because he thought that as a woman I would know something about women—I am sure that was my only qualification in his mind. Thankfully, he also asked Dawn Keremitsis, who had done work on Mexican women workers. Fortunately, I had included in my 1973 dissertation a chapter on women's vocational education. I wrote my entire dissertation on José Vasconcelos's educational crusade in a state of shock at the race and class biases I encountered in the documents. In the case of women, my outrage soared, propelled by my second-wave-feminist conviction that women had to be liberated from the slavery of the home. So I had written a dogmatic chapter and paper on how revolutionary educators wanted to remove women from the workforce, restore them to domesticity, train them to work in small, badly paid, home-based industries, and subordinate them to men and motherhood. Middle-class women prescribed class practices of motherhood and domesticity as if, I argued, women of the subaltern classes knew nothing of homemaking and mothering.

An Updated History of the National Association of Forensic Economics: 2002–2014

The National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE) has approximately 650 members across the United States and in other countries. While the association has been an active group at the annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) and at other regional meetings of economists, the growth of NAFE in terms of longevity and finances has allowed the organization to develop a more professional presence for its academic and practitioner members. This paper will update the original history of NAFE authored by Michael L. Brookshire in the Litigation Economics Review in 2003 which covered the period from NAFE's inception in 1986 through 2001.