Working with Archives: Cambridge Economics Through the MagnifyingGlass (original) (raw)

Cambridge Economics: A place, a people, an academic community and its Palgrave Companion

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2019

This is a review of Cord, Robert A. (editor), 2017, The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2 Vol., pp. XVII, 1225. £ 165 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-137-41233-1. The review focuses on the nature of Cambridge Economics, and what the different parts of this tradition make of it.

Is History of Economics What Historians of Economic Thought Do? : A Quantitative Investigation

2015

This paper presents a quantitative investigation into the history of economic thought (HET). Building on previous work (Marcuzzo 2008; 2012), we propose an empirical study with the aim of describing the dynamics of changes in HET in recent years, detecting three trends: 1) a sort of ‘stepping down from the shoulders of giants’, namely a move towards studies of ‘minor’ figures and/or economists from a more recent past; 2) the blossoming of archival research into unpublished work and correspondence; 3) less theory-laden investigations, connecting intellectual circles, linking characters and events. Using data from Econlit we show the evolution of the overall publication of het articles (1955-2013) and of HET fully or partially specialized journals (1993-2013); for the latter, by devising proxies which are amenable to quantitative assessment, we demonstrate that there is some evidence to support these claims.

Retrospectives: The Lost Art of Economics

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1992

Economists generally divide economics into two distinct categories—positive and normative— but how applied economics fits within these categories is unclear. This paper argues that applied economics belongs in neither normative nor positive economics; instead it belongs in a third category—the art of economics. Currently, many economists are trying to use a methodology appropriate for positive economics to guide their applied work, work that properly belongs in the art of economics. This three-part distinction is not mine, but dates back to a classic book, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891) by John Neville Keynes. In his book, Keynes argued that economists' failure to distinguish the art of economics as a separate branch from positive and normative economics would lead to serious problems. One hundred years later, he has turned out to be clairvoyant.

Back to the Future – the Marginal Utility of History in Economics

2007

Economics and economic history share many fundamental research problems and have a rich shared intellectual history. Still, works by economic historians are rarely read or referenced in economics. In this essay we attempt to identify the cost of this negligence. In particular, we argue that a restrictive understanding of the economic research programme excludes available evidence and precludes analysis of

Restless Clio: A Story of the Economic Historians' Assessment of History in Economics

As Time Goes By, 2002

Economic history has always been quite a peculiar department both in the domain of history and that of economics; dealing with change, institutions, collective rationality, and conflicting strategies of economic agents, privileging descriptive and nonformal analytical tools, economic history remained for long outside the scope of formal neoclassical economics. This chapter describes and discusses the story of the incorporation of economic history into the mainstream of economic theory through the cliometric revolution, a powerful intellectual movement emerging by the late fifties, which encapsulated this reconstruction of economic history from the point of view of marginalist price theory and the postulates of individual rationality; Meyer and Conrad were the major drivers of this radical vision, and challenged the 'old

Joan Robinson's “Secret Document” A Passage from the Autobigraphy of an Analytical Economist

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2006

The Modern Archives, King's College, Cambridge University contain a carbon copy of a three-page single spaced manuscript with the title “A Passage From The Autobiography of an Analytical Economist” (RFK/16/2/134–139, hereinafter “Autobiography”). Joan Robinson's initials are typed at the end of the document, which is dated October 1932.In October 1932, Heffer, the Cambridge University student bookstore, published Joan Robinson's methodological pamphlet, Economics is a Serious Subject, and she delivered the manuscript of The Economics of Imperfect Competition to Macmillan (Joan Robinson to Richard Kahn, October 30, 1932, RFK/13/90/1/19). The Autobiography was apparently drafted shortly after these two projects were completed. The typescript in Modern Archives, which seems to be the only extant copy, was not made until some months later. In a letter of March 2, 1933, Kahn suggested adding “a long section to your secret document if you can do so without spoiling it,” regret...