This looks interesting - a Palgrave Macmillan lecture on decolonisation with @nakedkeynes.bsky.social Esteban Pérez Caldentey, @jayatighosh.bsky.social & Wyndham Hacket Pain cassyni.com/events/GFrm3...

@cacrisalves.bsky.social Hi, at my suggestion, Bob Cord has been trying to reach you… maybe his email ended up in spam?

Reading the latest @resmedia.bsky.social newsletter I am encouraged that there seems to be a growing argument about narratives, in-between methods, radical uncertainty etc. that move, if not away from, then at least, wider than formal models.

And many economists appear to actively ignore past theories - the latest version must surely either incorporate or supersede how the subject was approached before. It seems to lead more to reinvention than reappraisal.

Harald Jähner’s ‘Vertigo’ on Weimar Germany does exactly that to great effect.

Very pleased to say that my chapter on Sidney Alexander for the Palgrave volume on MIT Economics is finally out! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Some thoughts on reading ‘Decolonizing Economics’ by @devikadutt.bsky.social @cacrisalves.bsky.social @surbhikesar.bsky.social @ingridhk.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/robertbi...

Indeed!

I was most impressed by this book when I read it, and this review confirms that. “A more speculative argument is that Hodgson’s institutionalism may represent a new … perspective ... Hodgson proposes a new form of institutional economics that has reached a wide audience”

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Mr James (Jim) Trevithick, who was an academic in the Faculty from 1976 to 2002. Jim was interested in macroeconomic issues such as inflation and unemployment. www.econ.cam.ac.uk/news/2025/re...

Sadly Jim Trevithick passed away at the end of May. He helped bounce some ideas around from an undergraduate essay & later became my PhD supervisor as the work developed. His lectures on money & macroeconomic teaching in general will be remembered fondly by many. www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2025/ja...

Absolutely, it is the process of gathering/understanding the information which results both in the written essay and the analytical building blocks to a knowledge that can be used elsewhere - initially in the subsequent exam - where the questions will be different. AI destroys that learning process.

Some great, quite philosophical, questions here about the nature of equilibrium and the homogeneity of capital and labour. Plus the breadth of the subjects. Would definitely have gone for Q5…

JL Borges once commented that we choose/create our own precursors. Equally important is what we miss out, as Marshall pointed out in his 1885 inaugural lecture about letting ‘the facts’ speak for themselves is “the part … played … in selecting and grouping them” This from ‘Decolonizing Economics’

This week’s interesting titles! Leigh’s short history is a great intro: putting the econ into an historical, social, institutional, & technological setting. Whereas Decolonizing Econ seeks to challenge our whole Eurocentric approach. They have an element of a return to political economy in common.

Sidney Alexander’s 1951 IMF Staff Paper 'Devaluation Versus Import Restrictions as an Instrument for Improving Foreign Trade Balance' and its 1952 follow up 'Effects of a Devaluation on a Trade Balance' are interesting in this regard. How resources/spending must be switched to vary imports/exports.

This is an extremely valuable and interesting resource as well as a huge achievement!

There is also a tantalising story of Sidney Alexander who had returned to Harvard, after his wartime OSS work, as an assistant professor from 1946. Instead of this mooted promotion he joined the IMF in 1949 where he developed the absorption approach to the balance of payments.

PS when it comes to quality of work I am quite confident in saying that widespread outsourcing and casualisation have been far more damaging than globalisation. And not to be confused. But then that would require a serious debate and potentially changing something.

Back where we had our wedding reception 40 years ago… changed a bit since!!

A great overview by @mazzucatom.bsky.social “we cannot cut our way to growth” ‘[S]hifting from a mindset which asks, “what can we afford to spend?” to “what does Britain need to thrive in the 21st century, & what are the structures, financing & tools that we need’ open.substack.com/pub/marianam...

Looking forward to getting further into this book by @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social Encouraged by the introduction including “What does ‘better’ mean?” (NB in 1957 Hansen would have already included nutrition, health, education, recreation…) and “The fundamental issue is the definition of value”.

This, I would suggest, is particularly true of economics which turned to increasing mathematisation in pursuit of a more scientific method but which helped obscure those value-based assumptions. In doing so we largely lost the poets and philosophers once amongst us.

A welcome addition… consider following if not joining!

Calling something “military Keynesianism” suggests a deep misunderstanding of Keynes’ economic thinking in general and his views of financing the cost of the Second World War in particular Short 🧵 www.theguardian.com/business/202...

"It is with great sorrow that I forward this message from Mark Pennington of King’s College London: “On behalf of the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, we would like to convey our profound sadness at the tragic loss of our colleague Professor Paul Lewis. (...)

Some thoughts on the European response to the chaos now emanating from the White House - on Ukraine and more broadly, based on chats with senior European policymakers directly or indirectly involved in formulating the bloc's response 1/

I am very sad to learn that my sometimes colleague and amazing Hayek scholar Paul Lewis has passed away. He was a professor of Political Economy at King's College. Paul was a great mentor, incredibly curious and open-minded, and never afraid to challenge in whatever environment I worked with him.

There is much promise here: “Our goal for History of Social Science is to create a platform for historians of varied approaches … the journal will host a conversation among historians of science, intellectual historians, and disciplinary historians” 1st issue (open access) muse.jhu.edu/issue/54109

Fascinating article on Tibor Scitovsky in the new History of Social Science journal… muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

Very happy to share this article in RHETM I’ve been working on for a few years—an attempt to systematize debates within the field and propose fruitful outcomes: ‘From History of Economic Thought to Intellectual History of Economics. rhetm.org/article/id/1...

A most interesting article on Marshall’s outlook by @cdanby.bsky.social

Ricardo’s Dream by @natjdyer.bsky.social has been an interesting read. Like a football match it comes in two halves with a halftime interval which leaps from the time of Ricardo through just over a century (via Jevons, Marshall & Keynes) to the neoclassical synthesis of the 60s in some 40 pages…

Looking forward to the contents of this delivery for tea later… the Chelsea buns come with an extra pot of sticky sauce. #Fitzbillies

Proofs are out for my chapter on Sidney Alexander… just a week to fight the publisher’s eProofing system and get them back. No pressure then!

EJHET is catching up on the backlog of issues. A special issue on Walter Bagehot is complemented by 4 fantastic reviews of books by Nelson, Tavlas, Burns, and Bigg on the history of 20th-century monetary theory (Reviewed by Clerc, Emmett, Laidler, Mehrling) www.tandfonline.com/toc/rejh20/3...

A brilliant find in the archives!

Finally caught up with a copy of Perry Mehrling’s review of the Hansen book in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought … and … tbh … quite relieved!

A musical radio play on Keynes. HT to Richard Van Den Berg of THETS for spotting this! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Theodor Emanuel Gugenheim took a First in economics from the LSE in 1913, he became an assistant to Edwin Cannan in 1914. On the outbreak of war he anglicised his surname to Gregory, and promptly volunteered for the Army. He enlisted in the Civil Service Rifles on 31st August. …

An excellent tribute to, & appreciation of, the contribution of Paul Davidson who died earlier this year by Thomas Palley, James Galbraith & @nakedkeynes.bsky.social. A key figure in post-Keynesian economics. His Money & the Real World remains an essential text. www.elgaronline.com/view/journal...

“The economy of the real world is a hideously complex affair, with all sorts of interactions… A detailed treatment which starts from the components suffers from impossible conundra about where one should begin, because each one is affected by others” so began Brian Reddaway’s Keynes Lecture in 1983.

“The lesson… we should draw from the history of economic thought is that economists should resist the pressure to embrace a one-sided or restrictive consensus. There is no kind of economic truth which holds the key to fruitful analysis of all economic problems...” PM Deane from her 1982 RES address

@pablobortz.bsky.social many congratulations on the AISPE award for your CJE article

The LSE Calendars provide a great insight into LSE teaching, even giving the per course fees in the days before grants and then student loans. Most courses were repeated in the evenings, it was quite the teaching load which took its toll on Gregory’s health, especially in the earlier wartime period

Silk Roads at the British Museum is a fascinating exposition of the interaction of trade, culture, technology, and thought: from East to West. Very busy having only just opened, so must return later. Just as uplifting was the reopened old British Library Reading Room, such a great room for working!

Originally for the New School boardroom in New York the series is a brilliant commentary on late 1920s America. Only one small panel of outstretched hands references the Great Depression, but would have been above the doorway.

Well worth a listen, and an interesting approach to a walk around Cambridge.

Decided to update my profile picture (with a nod to the 1930s).

I was thinking of writing a short Substack post on the wonderful Phyllis Deane. If anyone has any anecdotes to share that would be brilliant and much appreciated. Phyllis was a protégé of Alec Cairncross. Postwar she joined the NIESR working on national income. Stone invited her to Cambridge in 1950