Dear Steve,

Thanks for taking up this thread – regarding the Galbraith piece - it rather brought to my own mind the decline of the study of Economic History rather than that of Economic Thought.  By that I mean rather specifically the very detailed sort of studies taken up by such as Tawney, which it seems to me still flourished, at least in Northern England Universities and their outreach when I was young.  As far as I can tell – those departments have disappeared.

This thought was rather specifically due to Galbraith's promotion of MMT and in turn its clear connection as I see it to the ‘historical’ work of A. Mitchell Innes.  About a century back Keynes was well aware of neat way Innes conclusions fitted his own intellectual trajectory.  But he chose not to promote Innes - surely because he was aware that the historical scholarship presented there was third rate, and back then there existed a wide enough general readership who would be aware that it was third rate.  It seems to me a strange sort of progress that such a general readership no longer seems to exist and thus the work of Innes is promoted cost free as to reputation.

Pondering this matter it seems that many contributors to SHOE bewail the passing of the ‘good old days’.   Difference lie in when we should locate said days.  For my own part I am still regretting that 2020 was not much used to remember the publication of Francis Bacon's  ‘Novum Organum’, and especially this thought:

“words still manifestly force the understanding, throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and in numerable controversies and fallacies” and “we must bring men to particulars and their regular series and order, and they must for awhile renounce their notions, and begin to form an acquaintance with things.”

Robert Tye