I agree wholeheartedly with what Roy is saying. I am sure there are
many reasons. This does not apply so clearly in HET, but in British
history there used to be a view that serious history could not begin
until 30 years after the event, this being the time it took for
official documents to be released. We can do a lot without archival
material, but given that correspondence and other material does not
become available immediately, this is a factor working against study
of the immediate past.

Part of the problem is no doubt interest, but part of it is probably
the difficulty of knowing how to frame and answer interesting
questions. In short, contemporary history is difficult, partly because
it is so familiar and many of us have interests.

This is not a new concern. Consider the following paragraph:

"My argument is not simply that we should pay more attention to
applied economics (though we certainly should do this), but that we
should view economic theory as less central to the discipline than has
been usual in the past. The tendency to organise histories of economic
thought around developments in abstract theory, notably the theory of
value, even though it has a long history, reflects the present-day
orthodoxy in economics. ? [We have] a hierarchy in which abstract
theory is on top, with empirical economics at the bottom."

This was written nearly 15 years ago in the Preface to the second
edition of a book (Economists and the Economy, first published in
1988) that tried to construct an alternative canon for the history of
economics since Smith through structuring the book around applied and
policy problems. The book had great weaknesses (to some of which I
confessed in the Preface to the second edition) and it did not provide
the type of history I would now want to write (and which Roy wants us
to write), but it sought to make the point that focusing on applied
work had the potential not just to add to existing histories, but to
change them dramatically.

However, and this is the justification for the posting, writing a
history of contemporary applied economics is a difficult task because
it calls for a potential radical rethinking of the way we write our
history. I think some people underestimate the difficulties.

A volume relevant to this discussion is the HOPE supplement "Toward a
History of Applied Economics" that Jeff Biddle and I edited, in which
all the papers dealt, to some extent, with postwar economics. One
thing that this volume shows is that there is no agreed way to
approach the history of recent applied economics, or even what the
term "applied economics" means. In our introduction we talked about
some of the difficulties. The volume contained no study of an
organisation such as the NBER. However, though I cannot prove this, I
am certain that it would be much easier to obtain such papers now than
it would have been 10 years ago when we organised that volume. Ten
years ago, even Jeff and I were not posing the question in the way Roy
is posing it today, though I think we had a very similar goal in mind.

Roger Backhouse