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There has been some discussion in recent days of my recent paper 
"Economics and Psychology:  Lessons for Our Own Day, From the Early 
Twentieth Century." 
    [See the thread titled "HES: a depressing way to end the week" 
     beginning 30 Sep 96 but otherwise in the October archive. --ed.] 
 
Bruce Caldwell expressed concern that I did not cite Coats' research on 
the same subject, and speculated that I was "someone with no idea that a 
secondary literature by historians of thought exists." 
 
Let me explain who I am and allay some of these concerns. 
 
 
I am a fifth-year graduate student at Harvard.  My dissertation work is 
on the organizational structure of franchise systems, using an 
interdisciplinary approach combining contract theory and sociological 
interview-based empirical work. 
 
My undergraduate work was at Chicago, where I majored in economics and 
mathematics, while spending much of my discretionary time studying the 
history of economics and the other social sciences, as well as sociology, 
political science, and history.  As is the tradition at Chicago, my 
education on history of thought has focused on primary sources, and my 
article emphasizes these whenever possible. 
 
I did read Coats' paper, as well as many other secondary pieces.  In 
fact, I found many of the primary sources as a result of mining the 
reference lists of other papers.  My original paper (my honors thesis) 
did cite many secondary sources, mostly due to time-constraints which 
prevented me from exploring primary sources sufficiently.  Upon coming to 
Harvard, I did more research focusing mostly on primary sources, and 
wherever possible, replaced secondary sources with primary ones. 
 
Honestly, for my purposes, I did not find a direct reference to this 
particular article by Coats to be useful, although I am sure that reading 
his article was worthwhile.  In the interests of keeping my paper as 
short as possible, I have not referenced many of the works I read 
(perhaps even half of them).  Perhaps, in retrospect, it would have been 
good for me to cite more secondary sources, even ones not essential to my 
argument, in order to alert readers to their existence.  In any event, I 
do want to dispell any speculation that I'm someone who does not 
recognize the importance of the work of others. 
 
Leaving this issue aside, I do wish that, if there is discussion about my 
paper, it could focus on the substance of my argument.  I would love to 
engender some debate about the relationship between economics and the 
other social sciences, and how this relationship could be improved. 
 
Incidentally, the following are secondary sources which I do cite in my 
paper: 
Black, Coats, & Goodwin (1973), Howey (1973), De Marchi (1973), Mirowski 
(1988), Stigler (1950), Stigler (1977), Swedberg (1987), Viner (1949), 
and Winch (1973). 
 
One might also include in this list: 
Baron & Hannan (1994), Dickinson (1919), Hadley (1894), Houthakker 
(1950), and Smith (1991). 
 
 
---- Shira Batya Lewin <[log in to unmask]> 
 
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