David Mitch raises some useful questions, to which I would add a few more.

There have been many other attempts to write surveys for much the 
same purpose. One is the surveys that the Royal Economic Society 
commissioned in the sixties. There was also the series of readings 
published by Penguin Books (I don't know whether they were marketed 
in the US) that had substantial introductory surveys as well as 
reprints of articles. Another example, no doubt ineffective because 
marketed as a LIbary reference work, is Jonathan Michie's "Reader's 
Guide to the Social Sciences". Merely citing them is enough to make 
the point that such things get out of date very quickly. Still 
current are the Journal of Economic Surveys, and many encyclopedias, 
not to mention many one-off surveys of particular fields.

The AEA surveys of the 1940s and 1950s were probably important for 
reasons rooted in the history of the time. It might be worth trying 
to explore these reasons (a potentially interesting HET project in 
itself), and maybe the histories of other attempts to provide 
surveys, with a view to working out what might work today.

More important, how would the proposed venture offer something beyond 
that found in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (second 
edition, 2008), the online version of which was being updated as soon 
as it was published? (Or the International Encyclopedia of Social 
Science?) Is the argument that the HES would be trying to undercut 
such publications (providing open-access material on the web to 
institutions that do not subscribe to sources such as the New 
Palgrave) or is it that the HES would produce something better? If 
the latter, would it be worth asking where it is that existing 
offerings fall short, and why the proposed venture would do better.

Issues concerning the web and the way it is used are, I suspect, a 
key issue. Do none of you have the experience of recommending 
students to read certain items that are ideal for an assignment, only 
to find that they ignore it in favor of material they can find using 
Google, even though the material fails to address the question?

Finally, if is a gap in the market, is there any danger that HES 
involvement might backfire on HET? Do many economists not hold HET in 
low esteem because they see history as no more than literature 
surveys that establish claims to priority? Is there any danger that 
the proposed venture might confirm this? Even if this is not a 
problem, I think there is still the problem that surveys perform 
different functions, and that ones that provide a historical 
perspective do not necessarily do what economists want from a survey. 
I would suggest that some of the best surveys took a clear position 
on the issues under review and stimulated debate. If the writer of 
the survey is not a protagonist before writing the survey, he or she 
becomes one by virtue of writing the survey. In contrast, history 
need not (perhaps should not) be driven by such concerns.

Roger Backhouse