I appreciate the trouble that Dierdre McCloskey, Eric Schliesser and Pat 
Gunning have taken to respond to my long-winded comments on HET. I agree 
with much of what each has said, and could probably reach even greater 
agreement if we were to meet and talk.  But I still feel that I have failed 
to make clear just why what I call HEA is a significant component of the 
intellectual enterprise we label 'economics', and why what I call IH (which 
is what most of the participants in this discussion are most interested in) 
is not. I wonder if it would help to use an analogy?  If so, what follows 
might serve as a vindication both of HEA and of its greatest practitioner, 
Paul Samuelson.

Suppose:
I am a senior member of the Imperial General Staff (like Joan Robinson's 
father in 1918). My business is tactics: how to win and how not to lose, 
battles. I find that I and my colleagues can learn a lot by studying the 
history of past battles.
Consider the second battle of El Alamein (23 Oct- 4 Nov 1942). What were the 
plans of the rival commanders (Montgomery and Rommel)? What were the 
relative strengths in infantry, artillery, armour and air support? What were 
the strategic and logistic parameters (the contemporaneous battle of 
Stalingrad, British command of the sea, Allied air superiority)? What were 
the daily and hourly movements of troops and tanks, deployments of artillery 
and air force, casualties, food, ammunition and petrol supplies? How 
important was the 'Devil's garden' (5-mile deep German minefields) on the 
one hand, and British artillery supremacy on the other?

            I make charts and plot in movements. I deal almost entirely with 
abstractions ('divisions', 'armour', 'break-throughs', 'fire-power'). I make 
a 'rational reconstruction' of the battle, and I and my colleagues play with 
scale models on a vast, indoor relief map. I ruthlessly ignore anything that 
will not throw light on the course and outcome of the battle: what the 
French were doing in Vichy France, what the Japanese were doing in the 
Pacific, what the Communist Party in Britain was doing to stir up support 
for the war, what Roosevelt really thought about Stalin. For the most part I 
also ignore the individual, personal stories of most of those who took part 
in the battle. Only the high-level decision-makers are interesting to me. I 
avert my gaze from half-starved German soldiers burning alive in their 
doomed tanks.

            And it need hardly be said that I abstract completely from 
everything else going on in the world that does not bear directly on the 
Desert campaign. I am of course aware that in April of that year Archbishop 
William Temple published Christianity and Social Order, that a few weeks 
later Bing Crosby first recorded White Christmas, that Copeland's ballet 
Rodeo premiered in New York in October, that on 29 October (the 7th day of 
the battle) the Germans murdered 16,000 Jews in Minsk, and the Alaska 
Highway was completed; moreover that a few weeks later the first controlled 
nuclear chain reaction took place in Chicago. But none of these things 
belong in my story: the only 'context' I am interested in is the North 
African battlefield.

            Am I doing 'history'? I don't really care whether that's what 
you call it or not. What I am interested in is tactics, and if by making 
rational reconstructions of byegone battles I can learn things that will 
make me a better tactician, that's what I'm going to do.

Anthony Waterman