Roy Weintraub expresses concern regarding inattention to

"the recent major changes in economics, namely those associated with the move from post WWII formal modeling to current empirical modeling, that the modern NBER fostered and which now defines modern (1980ish onwards) economics,"

and comments,


"I am still puzzled at the lack of attention even to the issue in the various HE journals and conferences, and Ph.D curricula in those few places that have programs in HET. Why might the inattention to modern economics be so systematic?"

In fact there has been considerable attention to economics from 1980 onwards in programs in the Netherlands for a number of years.  The research program of History and Methodology Group at University of Amsterdam made this an explicit focus in 2002 (http://www.fee.uva.nl/hme/), though the same emphasis existed many years before when Mary Morgan was chair of the group, a focus sustained at the LSE, and in the work of Marcel Boumans, who is now co-editor of JHET.  At Amsterdam, we treat the domain as being broader than macro and the NBER in including micro developments in game theory, experimental, behavioral, neuroeconomics, complexity, and evolutionary approaches, and term post-1980 period 'Recent Economics.'  The Amsterdam program also has a number of PhD students writing on this time period, including Floris Heukelom who is writing on the origins of behavioral economics, and has presented at a number of history of economics conferences, including the HES in Toronto.  He is now at Radboud Nijmegen University, where Esther-Mirjam Sent is chair, who has long emphasized recent economics in her own research.  In addition to Amsterdam and Nijmegen, the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics at Rotterdam under Jack Vromen and previously under Uskali M?ki also emphasizes recent economics, has a long-standing seminar series, and has produced a number of PhDs, including Caterina Marchionni, now book review editor of Journal of Economic Methodology.  At Amsterdam I have taught History of Recent Economics since 2003 (syllabus posted under working papers at http://www1.fee.uva.nl/pp/jdavis/), and recently published "The turn in recent economics and return of orthodoxy" in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (at SSRN http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=233483).

Work on recent economics in the US is also hardly non-existent.  Phil Mirowski's Machine Dreams book cannot be overlooked, and David Colander, Ric Holt, and Barkley Rosser have done important work in defining change in recent mainstream economics.  Wade Hands has written on the changing relation between psychology and economics.  Earlier there was also the 1997 Duke University conference, 'New Economics and Its History,' which appeared as a 1998 HOPE annual supplement volume.  Indeed Duke promotes focus this in its promotion of archival research in the Economists' Papers Project (http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/collections/economists/).

John Davis