It is quite instructive to find that amongst historians of economics, it
is in any serious way controversial to have written that, "you do not
become a better physicist by reading Newton, Rutherford and Einstein,
but you do become a better economist by reading Adam Smith, Marx and
Hayek." And what I mean by "better" is straightforward enough to me:
economists are more likely to add value in whatever projects they
undertake if they have studied HET than if they have not. I cannot see
how being ignorant of the history of the relevant theory leaves an
economist on an equal plane with a second economist, equally well
endowed with modern theories and technique but who has studied HET as
well.

I am more than content to accept that this is the central issue but if
it is, then we are living in an entirely different moral universe.
Whatever pre-postmodernism is, that is me. I do think some conditions of
the world are better than others. I am judgmental about some things and
this is one of them.

If it is true [!], as Roy wrote, that “an overwhelming majority of
modern economists find HET of no use whatsoever in their own projects--
then this is either because they have knowledge of HET but this
knowledge provides them with no useful insights (but how would we know
this is true even if we thought it?), or they do not have any such
knowledge and therefore cannot know one way or another whether such
knowledge would have been of any use to them if they did have it.

Or to put it more bluntly, an understanding of HET is either useless to
economists in their professional lives as economists or it is not. Roy
seems to think it is useless; I do not.

This is not something we will resolve here on this website, but it does
seem to me to be the major threshold issue in HET. Roy would, it seems
to me, be fully content to join historians and philosophers of science
and withdraw HET from the economics discipline. I not only do not want
to withdraw from amongst economists, I want to stake out a position
amongst the mainstream that reminds them of just how valuable and
important HET is to them.

Economic theory without HET is a very thin and uninteresting area of
study it seems to me. I can almost not think how economics can be done
at any depth without HET but maybe it can. Maybe economics really is
like physics (or dentistry) with its history of no use in the practice
itself, but it would then be a social science so shallow and superficial
that it would not be worth the effort.

But tell me then how to classify this. The first sentence in the first
article in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of Political Economy
(Vol 116, Number 5) reads as follows:

"Becker's (1957) seminal The Economics of Discrimination launched the
formal analysis of labor market discrimination amongst economists."

What the article does is test Becker's predictions. It is therefore
mainstream economics but is it not also HET? There is no reason that
that same sentence could not be the first sentence of an article found
in HOPE or JHET. This is going into the past to go forward.

I don't know what economists in general believe about HET and its uses.
But if they think everything they need to know can be found in the
latest journals and the most recent texts, they could not be more
clueless about the kinds of knowledge that might actually assist them in
their work. That I actually find that most economists I know do
appreciate HET, and would like to have a deeper knowledge, may only be a
reflection of the different circles in which we travel. I am not
prepared to allow HET to retreat into the history and philosophy of
science just yet, and if the economics profession at large has any idea
what's good for them, they will make sure that doesn't happen either.

Steven Kates