Monday, December 26, 2011

Blog related syllabi


Here are a few of my syllabi for graduate courses: Macroeconomics, History of Economic Thought, and Economic History. As you can see we still teach history of ideas and economic history, something that is increasingly rare even in the few heterodox places left in the US. Philip Mirowski describes in this way the reasons for that:
"After a brief flirtation in the 1960s and 1970s, the grandees of the economics profession took it upon themselves to express openly their disdain and revulsion for the types of self-reflection practiced by ‘methodologists’ and historians of economics, and to go out of their way to prevent those so inclined from occupying any tenured foothold in reputable economics departments. [2] It was perhaps no coincidence that history and philosophy were the areas where one found the greatest concentrations of skeptics concerning the shape and substance of the post-war American economic orthodoxy. High-ranking economics journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy, declared that they would cease publication of any articles whatsoever in the area, after a prior history of acceptance. 
Once this policy was put in place, and then algorithmic journal rankings were used to deny hiring and promotion at the commanding heights of economics to those with methodological leanings. Consequently, the grey- beards summarily expelled both philosophy and history from the graduate economics curriculum; and then, they chased it out of the undergraduate curriculum as well."
 The whole interview with Mirowski is here.

3 comments:

  1. Matias, Utah is atop my list of phd programs that i've applied for, could you explain what the economic doctrine field is? Is it the development of economic thought?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Create a blog for sharing useful information all over the world is a nice habit but if you want to start a free blog than U blog is the best option for you.

      Delete
  2. That's great CMD. Yep, send me an e-mail to vernengo@economics.utah.edu and I can expand more about it.

    ReplyDelete

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