Did econs make these assumptions because they believed them true?

-what were Arrow vs Debreu's goals?
-how Coase vs later users viewed transaction costs
-how many assumptions stuck for tractability reasons? press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/14116

https://twitter.com/Lprochon/status/1773023384344904120

Did the rise of experiment challenge these assumptions, then? and

Whatever happened to those economists modeling disequilibrium? and tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
abebooks.com/9781107023192/…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The art of writing an abstract (with a hatchet)

It's harder than I thought to find studies of friendships in the history of econ, but a few random thoughts:

friendships relies on mutual trust and respect, which in turns create intellectual space for disagreement

(Simon on Marschak below) most discussions of friendships, while not delving into their consequences on science, emphasizes fair criticism

(Arrow on Samuelson, and Friedman on Stigler below)

Rawls and the econmists: the (im)possible dialogue.

Super cool paper by Herrade Igersheim
cairn.info/revue-economiq… Igersheim shows that economists initially expressed enthusiasm when the Theory of Justice came out:

Who said when?

"an economist writing about justice and equality is a little like a mathematician writing about music and harmony" (and also, do you agree with this statement?)

1/🚨New Paper Alert🚨

“Heterogeneous households in macroeconomic models: a historical perspective”

joint with @P_G_Duarte & Aurélien Saidi

Comments welcome!

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf……

Will tweet later, but 3 important caveats:

First, it’s a history paper, not a survey 2/ It means that we strive for *representativity*, not *exhaustivity*, aka that there is a lot of equally important heterogenous agent macro models that we don’t cover

Which models to include was decided on historiographical ground (usually case studies helping us document...

1/ This fascinating thread encapsulates 2 key feature of the mainstream (Krugman) vs heterodox (Kindleberger) faultline

-they have different epistemologies (aka idea of what’s a good contribution to econ)

-epistemological preferences are often disguised as positive statements

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1581665758547177474

2/ For Tooze reflecting on @PMehrling ’s new bio of Kindleberger (and for K himself, as showed in his criticisms of Bernanke’s work on Great Depression ineteconomics.org/perspectives/b…), a good contribution to the theory of banking, money and financial crisis is institutionally exhaustive

1/ I only marginally work on these histories, but I’m teaching them & being asked often about, so

Here’s long thread on some controversies over how economists modeled nature after World War II & contexts

(exhaustive history of environmental econ thread is beyond my ability) 2/ Caveats: it’s a lot on valuing nature (rather than commodification and marketization), centered on economists’ tools & concepts rather than environmental policies per se, US/western male centric

I much welcome reading suggestions to correct these biases in my lectures!

1/Later today I'm participating to an ESHET (eshet-conference.net/sofia/ed2020/p…) roundtable on the legacy of Lucas's 1972 paper & monetary non-neutrality, so here are a few thoughts:

(not a thread on history of the paper & Lucas's program, there are whole books on this...) 2/ (by de Vroey cambridge.org/core/books/his… and Galbacs elsevier.com/books/the-frie… , this paper by Boianovsky offers good wrap-up papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…)

A few points:
Lucas said he was pushed by Phelps to move to general equilibrium

Combination of modeling tricks is what mattered:

1/ Considering the city as an object of analysis for economists is fairly recent: a thread on the history of US-born urban economics

Based on a paper w/ @rebours_anthony , but my rendition, omissions & exaggerations, with epistemological hand-wringing at the end 2/urban econ’s claimed prehistory is well known: Von Thünen on ag land, Weber on industry location, Lösch/Christaller on central places. Germany produced location theory stars. Yet yheories were brought to US by geographers like Ullman rather than econs & city was not core object

1/There’s this economist few remember, who wrote the 1st 2-sectors growth model, brought Pontryagin to econ, played rugby w/ Inada, argue over Marxism & Keynes w/ Solow & Kahn, rediscovered Veblen & ended up contributing to a papal encyclical.

His name is Hiro Uzawa (宇沢弘文) 2/ A caveat: this is not a historical account, but a summary of Uzawa telling his own story in the wildest MD interview ever

(TBH I also enjoyed this interview because the reluctant interviewer I am can relate so much with things going out of control) https://t.co/ggLIdTMMkHcambridge.org/core/journals/…

Having fun re-reading the Solow-Robinson correspondence. Excerpts:

(note 1: just gossiping here. For serious account of relationships between 2 Cambridges over 30y, see )

(note 2: why is the only pic of young Robinson so gendered?) paulromer.net/wp-content/upl…


It began with a comment from Solow to Johnson, in the summer of 1953:

“a recent paper by Joan Robinson on Capital theory? I wish I could understand a word of it, since Paul and I have been working at what I think is a related problem. But it remains impenetrable.”