History of Economics: Ideas, Policy and Performativity

Rather than a traditional workshop where people present existing papers, we are seeking short contributions of around 10 minutes that provide insight into how economic ideas change the way the economy works (see workshop rationale below for examples). We envision these being case studies from people’s research, which may be on an entirely different topic. The idea is to juxtapose many cases from different contexts and time periods to spark discussion and debate about how ideas shape and are shaped by the economy. We welcome proposals from faculty and PhD students alike.

To submit a proposal for a case or register your attendance, please use the following link: https://forms.gle/yZER9TyTz7qpU1uh7

In 2013, Mary created a new graduate course called History of Economics: Ideas, Policy, and Performativity, upon which the book project will be based. The course asks: “If you want to change the way an economy works, how do you do it?”; or to use the more technical language of the course title: how do ideas become ‘performative’ to make an economy behave more like the ideas economists have about how it should work?

The traditional and simple answer is: economists have ideas, they are translated into policy, and then put into practice. This answer is naive on many fronts, underestimating the immense difficulties of that final step in overcoming the challenges of economic events and political changes of the 20^th century. Major wars, great depressions, the development agendas of new states, let alone revolutions into socialist economies offer the major examples used in the course in order to analyse and understand the problems involved. But we also look at more measured but major shifts such as the formation of a ‘welfare state’ (the subject of Mary’s public lecture for the Department in 2023), for as society demands action, then much else has to change concurrently. All these major shifts involve not only changes in economic processes and institutions but also cognitive and behavioural changes in peoples’ economic lives.

During these 20thC changes in economic history, economists evolved new ideas about how economies work, new ways of describing the economy, and of measuring the economy. These are part of the course, but we also use ideas from political history, from sociology and accounting, from history of statistics, and from philosophy of science to understand how these major changes in economic life are created. Thus the course is an eclectic mix of social scientific approaches to the main problem, and intriguing primary case-work materials, to answer that question of how to get the economy to change behaviour.

Over the years, the course has gained from many collaborations - particularly with the Department’s Teaching Fellows who brought their own backgrounds and cases to the course: Helen Yaffe, Guillaume Yon, Andrès Guiot-Isaac, and Federico D’Onofrio. In addition many of the PhD students and MSC students who have taken the course have fed ideas and cases into the mix and even contributed archive materials. The ideas of the course have also gained immensely from interactions with academics across the School.

The workshop hopes to attract new cases from economic history and new thoughts about analysing the processes of change and to engage a wide range of scholars in a discussion of these issues.

The programme will be posted here when finalised.