“Nao reduzam o defice” diz o fantasma de Keynes, in Jornal de Negocios, Opiniao, 20 Abril 2011, p. 44. [download]
(Also posted here)
Great ideas are earned through hardship. It is a conviction that requires no argument, inscribed into our collective consciousness. As I have been writing/researching about Milton Friedman’s popular writings, I was surprised by the (popular) claim that Friedman was for many years an outcast in the economics profession, the proof was that such a respectable place as Duke University refused to carry his books (the specific source was a celebration of Friedman’s life by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek).
Milton and Rose Friedman write in their autobiography Two Lucky People, page 341 in the 1999 edition, of a letter sent to them by Mark Rollinson in 1989, who 30 years earlier had been a student at Duke University,
My years at Duke … were not happy ones. … To make matters worse, most of my fellow students and all of my professors held my views on several subjects in overt disdain.
One day after particularly severe ridicule in an economics class I went to the professor after the session and told him that I was quite certain that I was not stupid and I asked him if there were not at least some economists who shared my views. “Oh yes,” he said “as a matter of fact we’ve discussed you frequently here at the faculty level. You’re nearly a clone of some chap in Chicago named Milton Friedman. It’s truly amazing.”
Well, I went running over to the library with your name in hand, only to find that you were in the name catalogue. On consulting with my professor later, he explained that Duke had a system of screening new material by the appropriate department and the Economics Department did not consider your work worthy of carrying.
Whereupon I went to the Dean of Men … and made an offer: put Friedman into the library or take Marx out; otherwise I would write a letter to the editor of every newspaper I could find.
They opted to add you and keep Marx.
When you received the Nobel Prize, I was prouder probably even than you, as you might imagine.
On some days the “black dog” comes barking. Rough days when your ego deflates, and the future looks grim, as when your former supervisor comes to town and wrecks your expectations of a future in this academic business. You feel low, light headed, in a reverie, and unable to move forward, and yet… you put some running shoes, and slide into a lazy sprint. Half an hour later, and you are still going, tireless. And you feel good, so you go a little bit faster. And you go, you keep on going.
Juiz em causa propria, in Jornal de Negocios, 18 de Janeiro 2011, Opiniao, p. 38. [download]
The Enemy Within: Academic Freedom in 1960s and 1970s American Social Sciences in History of Political Economy, 2010, 42(Supplement): 77-104.
Argument
(early abstract, but that does describe the subject)
Inspired by the sixties’ New Left, the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, social scientists labeling themselves “radicals” challenged the cultural norms of American society and of professional conduct. Left-wing in ideology and practice, the radicals staged protests in the campuses and experimented with new curricula and pedagogy. In the early to mid 1970s many radicals saw their contracts terminated or were otherwise denied tenure. Their response was to file complaints of political discrimination at the professional associations. The essay examines reports and correspondence from the American Association of University Professors, American Economic Association, American Political Science Association and American Sociological Association to compare each profession’s response to these allegations. This exam highlights differences between the disciplines’ definition of politics and its putative role in the classroom.
In my other regular outlet I wrote a piece on N-grams and history of economics. But the best picture I got from my queries was non-professional.
Asking about the frequency of words “father” “mother” “sister” “brother” “friend”, I got a really nice storyline. Early 19th century it was all about the boys: father and brother, which are nearly twice as frequent as mother and sister; the gospels looming big I am sure. By 1900s the males go on a slow decline. Sister is also in decline, but mothers are up and coming from the early 19th century and overcome father by mid 1960s.
Not my fault that I am a Momma’s Boy, it is just zeitgeist!
Even if I was only the ironic twist.
Past and Present
DENVER – Perhaps this year the event acquired a name that at last will stick. The World Financial Crisis? The Great Recession? Why not call it The Long Slump, said Robert Hall, of Stanford University, in his presidential address at the meeting here of the American Economic Association.A slump describes the time that passes, once a recession begins, before employment returns to its normal level – an average since 1948 of jobs for 95.5 percent of the labor force aged 25 to 54. This slump, which began in the autumn of 2007, is expected to last most of a decade, he said, before the unemployment rate returns to its post-World War II trend. By no means as deep as the Great Depression, it would be almost as long.
The most interesting sessions at the meetings this year were those concerned with what has been learned about the sources of the crisis, and about measures that might be taken to prevent it from happening again. It has become a commonplace that economics had grown overspecialized, that macroeconomists, monetary theorists and finance experts had paid too little attention to each others’ work. That plenty of progress had been made in the borderlands was clear. That no consensus as yet exists about what happened was equally apparent. That “they are working on it” is about all that can be said with certainty.
Interesting, too, was the undercurrent to be found in many conversations of interest in the history of economics itself. History of economic thought – or history of science, if you prefer – is a subject that has all but disappeared in the last thirty years as a topic of major research interest or as a subject of courses in top graduate schools – precisely the period of economic triumphalism.
