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Since some of my comments started this latest discussion, (and it has been a good
discussion) I thought I'd add my own view of the role of history of economic thought in
grad school.  In my view there's way too little of it taught, but I'm less worried about
the specific courses in the history of thought, and more worried about the lack of any
context in graduate classes themselves.
 
What I mean by this is that students today learn micro, macro, and econometrics as if the
subjects developed yesterday, and hence have little sense of the depth of thinking that
existed before or any context into which to place their ideas. (A number of students do
not know the pronunciation of Keynes, since he was never mentioned in any of their
courses.) The students want some context, but more and more the faculty who teach the
courses are unable or unwilling to provide it. The students are interested; I recently had
five grad students drive up from Harvard to attend my history of thought seminar, because
they were interested in how I was connecting some of the early work with some of the
recent work. They were extraordinarily bright and eager to discuss the issues.
 
I concentrate on thin history because I think it provides the context for thinking about
issues at the level that economists whose interests are not in the history of thought can
absorb it. I write for them, not for other historians. In my view thick histories pull in
other directions and are pretty much unabsorbable by economists. Good "thin"  history of
thought provides context for recent developments. It is by definition a generalist
subject. It requires a knowledge of the constantly changing field that necessitates the
person doing it being in economics, not in another field such as philosophy of science or
history. So, in my view there is an overall perspective that is missing for many of our
grad students that causes them to lose sight of the gray areas of policy and theory.
 
I have pushed in my own way to get some grad schools to give some thought to training
people in generalist thought, or at least to see it as something they want students to
know about. I thought focusing on training generalists would be a good strategy for some
mid range grad schools, because it meant that they would not try to compete on the same
dimension as the other schools. That was my message in my "Educating Economists" book and
it was also a recommendation of the Cogee Report, but it has gone totally unheeded.
 
In my view, adding a history of thought course, or a history of thought requirement, will
not remedy the situation. Students quickly learn what is, and what isn't, important to
success, and act accordingly. I've had students tell me from various schools "Yeah, we
have a requirement for ---, but it's a joke. Other professors tell us to not bother and
spend our time on other subjects." Where we need more history of thought is in the courses
--give students 3 or 4 articles or books to read summarizing the development of thinking
in the course and test them on it in a serious way in the comprehensives. Unfortunately
comprehensives today are generally not comprehensives; they are simply another course exam
made up of the same questions one had in the course, and graded by the same people who
taught the course. The argument that "good" economists at grad schools give me about the
reason the generalist overviews  are being eliminated is that teaching the techniques is
time and thought intensive, and that students can learn generalist ideas on their own. I
don't buy it, but that is the view that is out there so I don't see the situation changing
soon.
 
All this is not to say that what grad students are learning is not good, or that it is
ideologically motivated. I, and the grad students I interview, are excited about new
developments in economics today in a way that they weren't 15 or 20 years ago. The
cynicism that I discussed in the Making of an Economist 15 years ago is gone, and there is
excitement in the air. There is a belief that the knowledge students  are gaining in
graduate school is helpful in understanding the economy.
 
Part of the reason for this excitement is behavioral economics, part is the developments
in game theory, part is new developments in statistical methods and analytic techniques,
and part is the development of field and natural experiments. Those techniques pull
information from data better than before,  shed more light on issues, and  provide
enormously rich possibilities for dissertations and articles. Whereas before economics was
primarily deductive and rather sterile, today it is more and more inductive. Thus, in my
view economics is now undergoing a change in which it can no longer be usefully called
neoclassical economics.  Where the history of economic thought fits into this new
economics is something I'm not sure about. Thick histories will pull it out of the field,
and there is less and less training in the generalist thought that are the essence of thin
histories.
 
Dave Colander 
 
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