The 2012 Summer Institute concluded on Friday, June 22, ending two weeks of sessions that examined important developments leading to the economics that is taught and practiced today.
Led by a team of eight lecturers--all specialists in certain aspects of contemporary economics--thirty-one students discussed and explored such topics as the history of game theory, the ordinal revolution and revealed preference theory, and the history of econometrics, as well as the American institutionalists, the influence of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper and economic methodology.
For a complete list of sessions, please see the program page of the Institute.
The students, most of whom were in PhD programs or had just completed their dissertations, were also introduced to the archival holdings in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Rubenstein Library contains the Economists' Papers Project, a premier collection of the papers of over fifty economists, including several Nobel Prize winners such as Robert Lucas, Robert Solow, and Paul Samuelson.
On Tuesday of the second week, Duke professors Craufurd D. Goodwin and E. Roy Weintraub offered students an alternative to the approach to studying the history of economics implicit in the other sessions. Whereas the other sessions sought to uncover the history of economics through the major publications of iconic figures in the field, Craufurd and Roy described an approach that emphasizes the multifaceted context--the historical, professional, and personal, among others--in which economists "do" economics.
For Konstantin Kucheryavyy, the 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 helped to clarify his own view of science. “How much is economics a science? How much is it an art? What I learned at the Institute is that those are very open questions.”
Most students who attended the Institute were 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 read some of the materials in the Paul Samuelson papers when he was not attending Institute sessions. He was able to connect what he learned in the lectures with what he saw in Samuelson’s papers.
According to Marcel Boumans, who led three sessions on the history of econometrics, the Institute gave students a feel and intuition for history. Marcel said that on the last day of the Institute, a student said that he thought that all of the models and theories he had been taught in his economics classes had been around forever; he could now see that they were quite recent developments.
"That sounds obvious, but you have to see it," said Marcel, who is a professor at the University of Amsterdam and who will be a guest lecturer at Duke this fall. "History is not the true story of something, but a discussion of different interpretations. Most students want someone to tell them what really happened. But that is not history. Instead, there are various histories, various interpretations, perspectives, styles, historiographies. For me, that was the central lesson of the Institute."
The 2012 Summer Institute was funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.