Since many of the students attending will not necessarily be writing dissertations in HET, I think it would be very useful to demonstrate how HET might be gainfully used by a working economist. I have two suggestions: 1. One of the things I think we always try to communicate is an "historical sensibility" -- how history is different from a literature review. One of the things I've found very useful in addressing recent topics, is to choose a seminal paper in a particular field, especially a policy paper because here the interactions between theoretical change and broader cultural and historical changes are of significance, and have students write "what do we know now that we didn't know then, and more importantly, how do we know it and why do we know it?" They often discover that those old guys were brighter than they initially appear to a graduate student. They also recognize very clearly how ideas can sometimes have an impact on history. That is, part of what we now know that we didn't know then is due to the fact that policies were influenced by that old paper, and sometimes those policies had unforeseen consequences. And, almost inevitably, they discover that our increased "knowledge" is purchased by what we've chosen to forget. 2. When I work as a health economist rather than a historian, I am usually in a team of people with many different kinds of backgrounds and training -- practitioners, political scientists, sociologists, epidemiologists, anthropologists, etc. While economics is lagging a bit behind other social sciences in adopting a team approach to research, it is (I believe) inevitable. This is the future our students will face. Much of the time of team members is spent "translating" -- from economic jargon into language docs will understand, and from the patient-centred focus of a physician to the systems perspective of a sociologist, all ultimately aimed at producing a report for the funder that will generate a refereed paper (for our CVs and subsequent grants) as well as a "briefing note" for the minister. Needless to say, everyone in this chain speaks a different language. HET is excellent training for this task, because much of what we do involves "translating" the literary explanations of classical scholars into the formal models of our contemporaries, and vice versa, without putting words (or symbols) in anyone's mouth. Even understanding the debates of the past in the terms of the day involves this kind of exercise. That is, how can we "translate" honestly, recognizing differences when they exist, but also recognizing similar insights expressed in different language and different forms? I can think of at least two ways to approach this task at a summer school: a) we can engage in a sophisticated kind of rational reconstruction; or, b) we can think about the myriad issues of translation that occasionally bubble to the surface in this list. Evelyn Forget