1/Long tweetstorm about the bumpy road toward developing macroeconometric models at the Fed in the 1960s, and their difficult integration into the monetary policy decision-making process

Based on paper w/ @jcaacostamacia here osf.io/preprints/soca…

Tweets reflect my views 2/Our goal was to supplement those accounts of the “scientization” of central banking which are backed by quantitative analysis showing rise of PhD econ in decision (see @foxjust hbr.org/2014/02/how-ec… ) and advising positions (see @claveau_f & Dion epistemopratique.org/en/publication… )

1/ Reading 1970s state-of-economics debates in 2018 is a bit like looking oneself in a dusty mirror.

A demonstration with AEA presidential addresses: 2/ Attacks:

"Economists ignore normative aspects"
(Boulding, “Economics as a moral science,” 1968 Presidential Address jstor.org/stable/1811088 )

Hey @Forbes , do you have a color pic of your December 17, 1984 cover ? (featuring Ricardo, Samuelson, Smith, Tobin, Friedman, Modigliani, Keynes, Schumpeter)

Some reflections on a paper on "Samuelson, discrimination and gender bias" I just wrote w/ Roger Backhouse papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

It wasn’t a planned project, but the kind of data hoarding you know is going to itch forever if you don’t keep scratching until you have a paper At the beginning there was his famous deprecatory remark on “women and soapbox operators longer on intuition than brain” in his 1948 textbook, which found its way into JEC hearings in 1973 (see full story in this thread

https://twitter.com/Undercoverhist/status/977303031472705538

)

Names of economists 60 and above Samuelson suggested to the Nobel Prize, sorry Bank of Sweden prize in honor of Alfred Nobel committee in 1968 Then Samuelson goes on to write a road map of future Econ Nobels (in 1968, mentions Sen and Stigler elsewhere in the letter, though those who didn't got the prize are equally interesting)

1/ In 1938 as in 2018, trade wars, tariffs and mercantilism were hot topics. That year, Bryn Mawr economist Karl Anderson published a blistering critique of Australian econs’ attempts to establish a tariff on manufactured good in the QJE

(note: this is not a thread on trade) 2/ Anderson argued that free trade would maximize the real share of each productive factor, thus Australian national income. The underlying discussion of elasticities & returns of scales was, as often in those years, literary

Acknowledging your own gender bias: the case of Paul Samuelson.

1/ Samuelson was known for derogatory remarks on women, the most famous one he wrote in the 1st edition of his 1948 textbook (he was writing about the popular understanding of the consequences of rationing) 2/ In 1967, “soapbox orders” were replaced by “cranks,” & in the 8th edition (1970), women were dropped. But that year, in a NYT article on the new edition, he commented that “the girls at Sweet Briar won’t be able to do [extra questions], but honor students at Princeton will.”

To paraphrase @delong, intellectual & political agendas are "nothing but distilled, crystalized, and chemically cooked history." Which is why you should pay attention to the narrative that lay at the foundation of @glenweyl and Eric Posner's forthcoming book Their redux econ/intellectual/political history of XIXt/XXth centuries is outlined in their introduction (radicalmarkets.com/wp-content/upl…)
1) economic&social progress was architected by "Philosophical radicals," who endorsed markets yet sought to free them from aristocratic privilege

2017 HOPE special issue is finally out! Historians’ take on the so-called “empirical turn in economics.” read.dukeupress.edu/hope/issue/49/… Introductory paper sums up approach & case studies read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/4… [Free]
1)“Age of applied”= better characterization than “empirical turn”
2) theory dominance was short-lived episode in history of econ
3) theory is not dying, its relationships to applied are shifting

A few tweets on Al Roth's presidential address on "marketplaces, markets and mechanism design #ASSA2018 Mechanism design is what we do as theorists. Market design is what we do when we intervene in real markets to improve them. Practical market design part of economic engineering, which means details matter. Marketplace design ever better term than market design (more applied)