HOPE Conference 2011 Call for Papers:

"A history of observation in economics"

conference organisers: Harro Maas & Mary Morgan

The annual HOPE Conference in 2011 will take 
place in late April or early May of that year, 
and the topic for the meeting will be the history 
of observation in economics (see discussion 
below).  We invite expressions of interest and 
initial ideas for papers that might be developed 
in discussion with either of the convenors, 
and/or written paper proposals of 300-500 words 
to which they will respond: please email 
[log in to unmask] and/or [log in to unmask]

About the conference: By tradition, this is a 
small "invitation only" conference, where a small 
number of papers from an open call are accepted 
and all discussion of papers is in plenary 
mode.  These papers are then put through a normal 
refereeing process for consideration for 
publication in the Annual Supplement to the 
journal History of Political Economy (HOPE) for 
2012. (In other words, acceptance of a paper at 
the conference does not guarantee publication in 
the supplement, only consideration for 
publication.)  The conference is a 2-3 day 
meeting, where conference funds usually cover 
participants' hotel costs and meals, but only rarely their travel costs.

Recovering the lost history of observation in economics:
The aim of the 2011 HOPE Conference is to 
recover/uncover/investigate the now lost history of observation in economics.

Observation is ubiquitous in economics, but has 
become completely eclipsed from its history. 
After the rise of statistical thinking in the 
nineteenth century, and the econometric 
revolution in the nineteen-thirties, economists, 
methodologists and historians of economics came 
to identify "observations" with the statistical 
data sets that were gathered by statistical 
bureaus all over the world. These data sets - 
pre-recorded by others - served as inputs for 
economists' models and the testing ground for 
theories, and so these measurements came to be 
considered as the "observations" that economists 
work with. This state of affairs fits well with 
the mid-twentieth-century emphasis in the 
philosophy of science on observational 
statements, rather than on the process of 
observing itself, just as it fits economists' 
emphasis on measurement, quantification and 
testing.  But it makes the multifarious practices 
and techniques (political) economists have used 
and do use to observe the world vanish from view. 
It prevents an understanding of the (changes in) 
observational practices that can be witnessed not 
only in the past, but also at present.

 From an historical point of view the idea that 
the observations of political economists can be 
identified with statistical (quantified) data is 
far from obvious. Most famous perhaps are Adam 
Smith's observations of the working of the pin 
factory (probably taken from secondary sources 
such as the French Encyclopédie) that informed 
his analysis of the division of labour. Marshall 
made field notes of conversations with 
politicians, businessmen, and working men - the 
kind of observations made famous by Walter 
Bagehot's Lombard Street  -  and these notes were 
somehow translated into his diagrams and theories 
of long and short term markets and international 
trade. Ronald Coase's famous paper on 
transactions costs was amongst other things 
motivated by his experiences observing American 
industry. Because of the difficulties economists 
like Phyllis Deane and Wolfgang Stolper 
experienced in forcing statistical data from 
colonial and post-colonial Africa into the mould 
of Stone's system of national income accounts, 
they travelled there to observe and ask local 
inhabitants about their economic ways of doing.

Contemporary discussions about the importance of 
"real time data" for economic modelling and 
policy, show the economist's awareness that there 
is a gap between the recording and what the 
recording intends to express. The renewed 
popularity of surveys and questionnaires to 
gather information, the still very recent rise of 
game theory and the laboratory as new tools and 
sites to investigate markets and to produce 
"evidence", the introduction of spectacular new 
visualising tools like the fMRI-scan to observe 
individuals, the collapse of certain econometric 
forecasting techniques in the face of the current 
financial crisis, all press us to re-investigate 
our received understanding of what observations 
are in economics, and how practices of observation changed through history.

Possible themes that might be addressed by papers for the conference include:
-	Observation at the interface between 
economists, policy makers and the public.
-	Skills, tools and techniques of the observer
-	Sites for observing (political economy club, statistical office, laboratory)
-	Trusting local observers versus imposing central standards
-	Purposes of the observer and ways of observing
-	'Staging': intervening in order to observe, observing in order to intervene
-	Travelling, recalling and recording
We encourage contributions from different 
disciplinary backgrounds that enhance our 
understanding of the changing observational 
commitments of economists, government officials, 
travel writers, learned societies, official 
institutes and so forth. We aim at a conference 
and volume - a supplement to the journal History 
of Political Economy - covering a long time line, 
and a range of different media, sites and geographical areas.

Harro Maas