====================== HES POSTING ================== Petur Jonsson's opinions are interesting, though I am bothered by his ability to neglect much of what was said last fall and his rush to characterize people's aims in his own convenient, but inaccurate, reconstruction. If people think that thicker history is anything like what Jonsson makes it out to be, I doubt that they would be interested in it. What most needs to be addressed is Jonsson's thinly veiled sneer in his assertion that those who advocate doing thicker history don't know what they want to achieve with their work. In Jonsson's re-writing of the discussions from last fall, the advocates of thicker history are, at best, antiquarians who do "history for history's sake" and don't reflect seriously about making "better economic theories" or "doing economics better". This position may be accurate for some advocates of doing thick history, but I don't know who they are. I wrote extensively last fall about the need to do good history as a means of showing economists that historical thinking has value in understanding how economic theory changes and it is used by others. I won't repeat again what I said, but I believe that doing thicker, richer histories of the discipline are an integral part of helping to make a better economics. To take Jonsson's own example, I would think that a history of monetarism that looked at the inflation of the 1970's, the political position of the central banks that adopted monetarist targetting, the public perception of Keynesianism's failure, the instability of velocity in the 1980's (worldwide), the subsequent abandonment of monetarism, and the many self-contortions of monetarists in the face of empirical evidence that subverted their positions would be a much more useful history for professional economists than a rehashing of who thought that the IS-LM apparatus should or shouldn't be jettisoned. The kind of history I would like to see written would help economists to think more clearly about who uses their theories and why. And why their ideas, even the ones that economists are sure have all the relevant truths embodied in them, can turn out to be of little practical value. Jonsson can sneer all he wants about historical arguments that try to relate economic theory to women's hair fashions, but when he talks this way he has to understand that he's risking that no one he wants to speak with will take him seriously. Why should they? He doesn't understand or talk about their work seriously, so why try to talk with him? He certainly hasn't characterized my beliefs or opinions accurately. There is much more that could said about Jonsson's essay, but this will have to do as a quick effort to address his misrepresentations and his unfortunate sneer. Brad Bateman Grinnell College ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]