The first week of the 2012 Summer Institute at the Center for the History of Political Economy is now in the books, having ended on Friday morning, June 15, with a session by D. Wade Hands (University of Puget Sound) titled “Philosophy of Science and Economics: Positivism, Popper, and After.”
Nearly thirty students, most of them in PhD programs in the United States and Europe, spent last Monday through Friday learning about a number of topics important to the theme of this year’s Institute, the emergence of modern economics. American institutionalism, early and interwar econometrics, and the ordinal revolution and revealed preference were just some of the subjects discussed in the sessions. In addition to the session by Wade Hands, there were sessions by Marcel Boumans (University of Amsterdam), Bruce Caldwell (Duke University), and Malcolm Rutherford (University of Victoria).
Bruce Caldwell, the director of the HOPE Center, led things off on Monday, June 10, with a discussion of the Austrian school and its opponents. That evening—after a couple of anxious hours of heavy rain—the students took in a Durham Bulls baseball game. (The Bulls defeated the Toledo Mud Hens, 6–3.)
PowerPoint slides and handouts related to the sessions can be accessed by visiting the program page of the Institute.
For Konstantin Kucheryavyy, the first week of lectures made it clear to him that the scientific status of economics is still under debate. Konstantin, a PhD student at Pennsylvania State University with an interest in international trade, says that his introduction to the institutionalists, economic methodology, and the history of econometrics is helping to clarify his own view of science. “How much is economics a science? How much is it an art? What I’ve already learned at the Institute is that those are very open questions.”
Most students who are attending the Institute are encountering the history of economics for the first time. Not so with Kevin Bryan. Kevin, who is a fourth-year PhD student at Northwestern, attended the 2011 Summer Institute classes that were held in Denver. During his two-week stay at Duke, he is working on the Paul Samuelson papers when he’s not attending Institute sessions. He has been able to connect what he is learning in the lectures with what he is seeing in Samuelson’s papers.
The second and final week’s sessions will address such topics as game theory, Keynes and his critics, and Hayek’s postwar contributions. The lecturers will include Craufurd D. Goodwin (Duke University), Kevin Hoover (Duke University), and Robert Leonard (University of Quebec at Montreal), as well as Marcel Boumans, Bruce Caldwell, and E. Roy Weintraub (Duke University).
This is the third consecutive year in which the HOPE Center has organized and hosted a Summer Institute. The mission of the HOPE Center is to promote and support research in, and the teaching of, the history of economics.
The 2012 Summer Institute is being funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.