Dear Sandy,

Here's my contribution:

David Brett
Australian Bureau of Statistics

Dear Dr. Brett:

I have heard of the astonishing proposal to take the history of 
economics (the study of past economics) and even economic history (the 
study of past economies) out of departments of economics.

You will do permanent damage to the prestige of Australian economics by 
doing so.  No serious economic scientist---though a good many 
non-serious ones, it must be admitted, 3rd-raters with no intellectual 
depth---sees the past as a foreign country.  To make Australia the only 
country in the world to adopt such an anti-intellectual line is to 
reinforce the incorrect but widespread impression that Australian is a 
land of ignoramuses, and glad of it.

Look at it this way.  Most of what we know about economies and their 
analysis is, well, past.  In fact, all of it is.  Time moves, alas, in 
one direction.  So cutting off slightly old, or even very old, economic 
facts is like doing an astronomy that confines itself to the Solar 
System, or the local star group. 

Let me give you an example from my own current work.  We will never 
understand the rise of capitalism and the modern world until we 
understand what happened in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The 
crux of "what happened" was an intellectual change in attitude towards 
markets.  So history of thought joins with economics is illuminating the 
most important event in world history since the domestication of plants 
and animals, and casts light therefore on present economic policy.

I love the Lucky Country, and have spent a good deal of time there.  
(See my brief CV attached.)  One of its attractions was precisely the 
combination of democratic values with intellectual rigor (my friend the 
late Noel Butlin was the model of this).  The proposal throws all that away.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey