Since many of the students attending will not necessarily be writing  
dissertations in HET, I think it would be very useful to demonstrate  
how HET might be gainfully used by a working economist. I have two  
suggestions:

1. One of the things I think we always try to communicate is an  
"historical sensibility" -- how history is different from a literature  
review. One of the things I've found very useful in addressing recent  
topics, is to choose a seminal paper in a particular field, especially  
a policy paper because here the interactions between theoretical  
change and broader cultural and historical changes are of  
significance, and have students write "what do we know now that we  
didn't know then, and more importantly, how do we know it and why do  
we know it?" They often discover that those old guys were brighter  
than they initially appear to a graduate student. They also recognize  
very clearly how ideas can sometimes have an impact on history. That  
is, part of what we now know that we didn't know then is due to the  
fact that policies were influenced by that old paper, and sometimes  
those policies had unforeseen consequences. And, almost inevitably,  
they discover that our increased "knowledge" is purchased by what  
we've chosen to forget.

2. When I work as a health economist rather than a historian, I am  
usually in a team of people with many different kinds of backgrounds  
and training -- practitioners, political scientists, sociologists,  
epidemiologists, anthropologists, etc. While economics is lagging a  
bit behind other social sciences in adopting a team approach to  
research, it is (I believe) inevitable. This is the future our  
students will face. Much of the time of team members is spent  
"translating" -- from economic jargon into language docs will  
understand, and from the patient-centred focus of a physician to the  
systems perspective of a sociologist, all ultimately aimed at  
producing a report for the funder that will generate a refereed paper  
(for our CVs and subsequent grants) as well as a "briefing note" for  
the minister. Needless to say, everyone in this chain speaks a  
different language.

HET is excellent training for this task, because much of what we do  
involves "translating" the literary explanations of classical scholars  
into the formal models of our contemporaries, and vice versa, without  
putting words (or symbols) in anyone's mouth. Even understanding the  
debates of the past in the terms of the day involves this kind of  
exercise. That is, how can we "translate" honestly, recognizing  
differences when they exist, but also recognizing similar insights  
expressed in different language and different forms?

I can think of at least two ways to approach this task at a summer school:
a) we can engage in a sophisticated kind of rational reconstruction; or,
b) we can think about the myriad issues of translation that  
occasionally bubble to the surface in this list.

Evelyn Forget