In response to Roy's original entry:

     I have wondered the same in  more general way.
Why are historians of Economics "inattentive" to current,
even recent developments in Economics?  It is because
they are historians, not commentators on current events.

     There are any number of reasons why anyone would
not attend a paper I gave at the recent meeting of
HES in Toronto: "The Passing of Naive Neoclassical Economics".
It was about the current (the past thirty years) state of the discipline.
With one exception the session was attended only by
those presenting and the designated other participants.
Perhaps the message was not news.  
Perhaps the message was thought unimportant.
Perhaps, of course, I had done such a bad job of it that
the members turned to more scholarly scholarship.  Perhaps
my want of standing in the field made it easy, if not
imperative, to be "inattentive" to what I had to say.  
And perhaps there are other reasons.  The paper was
scheduled late in the program, and had more exciting
competition.

     However, I do think that there is an occupational
hazard in being a historian of thought.  One becomes immersed
in the past and, indeed, attached to it.  New developments
appear as disturbances to habits of mind.  They clutter the
field from which conclusions have been and might be drawn.
They make intellectual work.  They can be so easily
dismissed as one more passing fad.


Robin Neill