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