In September, when I went to visit Harro Maas and his family in the house in Chapel Hill that they are renting this fall, Harro warned me about the deer. “Oh, they’re only out at sunrise and sunset,” I told him. “At this time of night”—by then it was ten o’clock—“there’s nothing to worry about.” But as I backed out of his driveway, my headlights illuminated his neighbor’s front yard—and the two deer that were standing in it, quietly munching the grass.
Seems like the visitor knows more about the deer in this area than the permanent resident does.
Harro, an associate professor in the Utrecht School of Economics, at Utrecht University, is a 2011-12 fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy.
For Harro, the Center is the right place at the right time. “There is a leisurely quality to the way time is experienced here that gives you a nice pace of mind,” Harro says. The fellows often have lunch together, and it is the conversations at lunch that often provide him with a new idea or a new way of thinking about his own research. Even a stop at one of the popular coffee shops on campus can yield productive results. “I come to the von der Heyden pavilion and find Kevin Hoover sitting in one of those big chairs; he invites me to join him. The next thing you know, thirty, forty minutes have passed in conversation, and it all seems so natural. It’s fantastic.”
The first few weeks of his fellowship were spent “clearing the decks.” Harro finished three projects: an introduction to a special issue of the European Journal of the History of Economics on the practices of economists; a paper on the emergence of econometric modeling at the Dutch Central Bank; and the introduction to the collection of papers that were presented at this past spring’s HOPE conference on observation in economics. And on a recent Friday he led a discussion, along with another 2011-12 fellow, Edward Nik-Khah, on the book Merchants of Doubt, which was written by two historians of science. As the subtitle of Merchants of Doubt states, the book documents “how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming.” The discussion explored what historians of economics could learn from the authors’ project.
But a good deal of his time has been spent in Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with the Paul Samuelson Papers, which were acquired by the library in 2010.
Guiding Harro’s research is Samuelson’s 1958 Journal of Political Economy article that presents a model of overlapping generations to see if there is a (general) equilibrium interest rate that enables saving for retirement. “Samuelson’s model has been held up, unfavorably, as an example by Daniel Hausman of how economists end up constructing nice mathematical models without any empirical content and importance. I always felt there was something wrong with this assessment, as it hinges on a particular idea of what the empirical is in economics and how economists should go about in assessing their ‘theories.’ Following and in line with my project in the history of observation, my idea is that there are many ways of being empirical, and I am trying to reconstruct what this may mean in Samuelson's case.”
Before joining the faculty at Utrecht, Harro had spent more than fifteen years as a professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he was a part of a group of historians of economics. But faculty mismanagement led to the elimination of the group in 2010. In the ensuing months, amid the stress and strain of moving his project on the history of observation to Utrecht, Harro sometimes found it a challenge to keep the level of concentration necessary for his research. “Being awarded a Center fellowship gave me the time and space to find again the academic work I love so much. I feel I am starting to think again.”
Harro will return to Utrecht at the end of December.
--Paul Dudenhefer