Roy,

Don't you think the HET was disregarded by economists long before it came to be associated with heterodox thinkers?

I mean Stigler wrote his essay saying that we had little to learn from the study of the history of economics long before HES was a society that gave intellectual space to a variety of heterodox voices.  Kenneth Boulding tried to counter the dominant Whig interpretation of Samuelson already in 1971.

So lets do a thought experiment, imagine no heterodox voices found their way into the subdiscipline of HET, what would be the status of HET today within the economics profession?

My guess is that heterodoxy has little to do with the status of the subdiscipline, and instead it is an attitude that the farther a discipline looks into its own past the less scientific that discipline actually is in practice.  I could be wrong on that, but I would suggest that the placement record (both in terms of jobs and in terms of articles within the profession of economics) of the best and the brightest in the HET field over the past 50 years would reveal the the problem is far deeper than whether or not the subfield is seen as a  welcoming home for heterodox thinkers of all stripes.

There are costs associated with the close identity with heterodoxy (I blogged about them briefly in my own report on the HES meetings this year).  But the heterodoxy also brings some huge benefits to the table that make the HES meetings a more engaging experience than the typical economics meetings.  The participants care about economic arguments in a way that few economists do.  This enthusiasm can be a great source of stimulation --- even when one finds the arguments presented frustrating from the perspective of logic/evidence/relevance.

The economic science wars are not over forever --- there are glimmers of hope.  You just have to find the right margin to fight on. The interest in economic biographies, the interest in some melding of economic history and history of thought in the context of policy debates, and the interest in science studies all means that all is not hopeless that economists will find HET more valuable in the future.  I am an optimist in this regard, and still believe that good work in the subdiscipline can be rewarded. But it will only be rewarded appropriately in my mind when the meta-argument about what is progress in scientific thought is addressed head on.


Peter J. Boettke