John Davis's intervention is most welcome -- indeed I have great respect for
the work John has done in Amsterdam. The group there is quite special and
provides wonderful training and research opportunities in HE/ME.

However in looking over John's syllabus on modern (post 1980ish) economics
as he suggested, and rereading his posting, I think we may be talking past
one another. Behavioral economics, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary
economics, complexity theory, are all alternative theorizations to post WWII
neoclassical economics as it stabilized particularly during the 1950s. They
are all, however, newer theoretical perspectives generating new classes of
foundational models to be employed in analysis.  They have little if
anything to do, though, with what most economists are doing each day, and
their view of how economics "progresses".

Hardly any economist "does" theory. Yet most historians and methodologists
only look at, examine, and appraise theories. This is the disconnect I was
trying to address in my original posting. If one looks at the JPE, QJE, AER,
and Econometrica (and these are the most important -- by peer evaluations --
eEconomics journals), there is little if any theory-making to be found.
There is though a massive amount of applied economics, mostly these days in
what used to be called applied microeconomics. Fields like public finance,
industrial organization, resource economics, financial economics, and labor
economics are areas in which data based modeling, structural modeling, and
so on are the gold standard for success. The theoretical underpinnings are
hardly sophisticated. Indeed, I would argue that there has been a massive
retreat from theory, so much so that the original definition of econometrics
that the Econometric Society created in the early 1930s has now taken hold.
Using a distinction I employed in my 2002 book, the image of economics has
changed. In contrast, what John Davis is arguing is that historians at for
instance Amsterdam do indeed attend to the changed body of knowledge, as for
example the theory of games, complexity, etc.  That is too narrow a
perspective, in my view, and I find few historians, contra John Davis's
argument, who are examining these matters.

For instance, who has attempted to contextualize the immensely important
"Optimal Replacement of GMC Bus Engines: An Empirical Model of Harold
Zurcher" (1987) Econometrica 55?5, 999?-1033?

E. Roy Weintraub