The 2015 HOPE Center Summer Institute is now over and was a big success, introducing graduate students from Europe, South America, and North America to key themes in the history of economics.
The two-week program, which ran from June 1 to June 12, brought together twenty-two students for a crash course on the history of economics, with a particular focus on macroeconomics and postwar economists such as Paul Samuelson, who spent most of his long career at MIT, and members of the Chicago School, among them Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
The first four sessions took participants on a whirlwind intellectual tour beginning with Adam Smith and ending with A. C. Pigou, an early twentieth-century British economist known for establishing welfare economics. The remaining fourteen sessions focused on postwar developments in economics, prefaced with a look at efforts to grapple with the depression in the 1930s.
It wasn't all history, all the time, though. On the first Wednesday night, participants attended a Durham Bulls baseball game--which, in keeping with Summer Institute tradition, was played in rainy conditions.
For more on the Summer Institute, please visit the pages on the HOPE Center website devoted to the program. Also see a write-up on the institute on the Duke economics department website.