----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Robert, Thanks for your support for the idea of an international study group on monetarism! Your 4 point schemata is very good, I think. I admit that my own idea had been more limited, focusing more on your point number 4: " an investigation of the process by which monetarist ideas permeated the policy marketplace (in The Rise and Fall of Monetarism, David Smith made a start with respect to Britain)." I have felt for many years that we need a version of Peter Hall's (edited) collection, _The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations_, which is (for the most part) a set of country case studies of how demand management was (was not) adopted in several industrialized nations. This is why I had suggested an "international" group; I was thinking of a study of when and why monetarism had been adopted in different countries and when why it was abandoned in its formulation as a theory of macro-policy by monetary aggregate targeting. But I agree that your other points need more attention and that these are all aspects of one large story. I'm not sure that all four of these points could be addressed in a single volume. But perhaps it is only the limits of my original vision that would require the project to be a single volume? Although I do think that it might be easier to get funding for a study group focused on your number four. And the high quality of the Hall volume is due, in part, to the fact that they had the funding to bring all the contributors together more than once to refine and focus the papers (and to invite additional contributions as their value became more clear, if I remember correctly). Brad Bateman Grinnell College ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]