Episode Ninety Eight

Introduction

0:00welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics podcast i am still here and still sick and still one of your hosts jennifer john but i'm joined here today by a full house jenna akhtar is back welcome back we missed you thank you very much i'm so happy to to be here and see you and francois alice are you you are not in rome anymore you are

0:34back in lausanne no i'm back in lausanne yeah and i'm very happy also to to see you jennifer i hope you will be better soon and i'm very happy to see back china as well so the team is back on board

Guest Introduction

0:50yes indeed and today we are very excited to bring on board a good friend of the history of the field of the history of economics and a colleague of mine at the center paul dude and heifer who is managing editor of both politics and society which is a quarterly journal published by sage and history of political economy which is i hear they publish articles in the history of economic thought we do believe it or not we do paul you've spent much of your career here uh in or around

1:22duke university center for the history of political economy you've been a well-liked and admired member of the history of economics community for over 20 years now we're so happy that you're here welcome to the show well it's really an honor to be on the show and i i took the opportunity to listen to a few recent episodes and notice that you're coming up on your 100th episode soon so i really commend you all for keeping this up because i know it's a lot of work well thank you very much and thank you for

1:52to my to my wonderful co-host and scott who's sitting invisibly back there as our producer for keeping the show going for so long it's um it's a great thing for for us to have but now that we're all here jimla's got the first question for you are you ready paul i am ready yes how did you become a writer that's uh the main question first of all and second how did you get involved in the history

Becoming a Writer

2:20of economic thought you are not yourself a historian of economics yet you've spent the last several decades among historians of economics how did this happen uh how did you find yourself on the periphery of this community of weirdos that's not your word i'll point out i call myself as weirdo also saying that and it doesn't bother me at all and it doesn't bother anyone here and hopefully it doesn't bother

History of Economics

2:53anyone in general yes tell us a little bit about all that please well let me start with the second question first how i got to to hope so um before i before i joined hope i was a copy editor and proof reader for a social science research institute at the university of wisconsin and uh i moved to durham in 1999 and started applying for jobs and this job came up with this journal called hope published by duke

3:32university press i applied and got a couple of interviews and and was um hired for the job so it was really kind of just good luck um i was you know i knew nothing about virtually nothing about economics um virtually nothing about the history of economics you know i'd heard of of course smith and marx and mill and malthus um heard of galbraith uh heard of friedman maybe samuelson maybe not um

4:08definitely not ricardo or marshall or val ross those names meant nothing to me so um that's it really was just luck and and i didn't really think of it as my field and i didn't even see it as a job that i would have for it's going to turn out that it's going to be basically for the rest of my career um but you know i was working at the time very closely with crawford goodwin who was a fantastic

4:38person to work with and um you know you grow into a job you the thing that i liked about it was it was an intellectual subject it was something that i could learn about and continue learning about and there was this community attached to it and i realized that i could become a part of this community and and so that's that's how it all happened um let me answer your first question

5:09which is how i became a writer um i feel kind of like an imposter because i'm i really don't have a lot of publications to my credit most of my published writing has been for things like the hope center website and things like that um but i've always been very interested in writing and the writing process and still am um and so um you know it just sort of came with the territory i was always

5:39interested in literature um i like the idea of writing and i like the idea of writers i thought they were neat people you know um but that's how that's that's how that all came about

Changes in the Field

5:53so as an observer of of the writing of the history of economics how has the field changed since you first encountered it um what is your perspective on those on those changes that have occurred any big shifts that you've seen and just as a matter of personal idiosyncratic curiosity i'm curious as to what you make of the debate between internalists and externalists of the history of economics well let me start with that one first i i don't really know if i it's not something i really

6:28think about um it but but what it what strikes me is that so i think of internalists as looking primarily maybe solely at the published record so articles published in journals and things like that and whereas the the externalists look not only at the public the public the published record but um non-published things you know archival correspondence documents minutes of meetings

7:00photographs journals diaries you know those kinds of things and it seems to me that those are all

7:07pieces of evidence that should be consulted in constructing a history um that's kind of the way that i see it um you know i i don't really understand why someone would not look at all those contextual factors um i'm sure there are good reasons um and i'm sure there are people in the community who are internalists who can tell me what those are um but but uh but my my my my my sense is that they're

7:41both they're both pieces they're all pieces of evidence that should be consulted um that's that's my sense about that um does that does that answer your question yeah it actually does um like in the sense that in the sense that um i've i've seen this methodological debate in in amongst historians and and historical literature and i've always just been kind of so without revealing my own preference uh

8:13i have a tendency towards one of these as well and so i'm often puzzled like why the other sticks to their guns so much that they do um though i guess uh okay i'm just going to give my cards up i i think i tend towards externalism as far as my historical tastes go but for the internalist credit if someone were looking at my stuff and i mean 50 of my emails are me corresponding with someone that someone that

8:46that they that i know and it's usually something like me just going like ah

8:52yeah i suppose that's not useful so i guess that's a lot of noise i think you raise a really good point so so when you when something is formally published you're kind of saying this is the record of what i think or this is this is the record of what i did this is the this is the official record um the the unpublished things are things that need to be uh handled with some care for exactly the

9:25same reasons that for the reasons that you just just stated um you know people write when they write in their diaries and when they write in their letters and they're you know well i mean here's a good example i i i've been reading the letters of uh that van gogh wrote to his brother theo and i thought well i'm gonna write a letter like that to this good friend of mine so i got a steno pad and over several days i just wrote a little bit every day and and the more i wrote the more i realized wait a

9:56minute i might have been feeling that at that moment but i don't really feel that way generally

Good Editor Characteristics

10:02speaking do i really want to send this to him and get him concerned you know so so i think you have to be really i i think you have to be really careful when you when you look at the non-published record um and not over interpret what you find and not over interpret the fact that you didn't find something so i mean i'm just oh i'm sorry that's all right but i think those are too dangerous with looking at archival collections and things like that and i think there's a sense in which the

10:36distinction that i've kind of drawn here between the internalist and the externalist is actually not really as sharp um as i'm making it out to be because we have a whole bunch of evidence we have a whole bunch of material to work with and everyone across the board has to be kind of selective about it somehow so there's another thing with with the published record is i mean this is becoming increasingly the case i think is that there might be one name on the title page but lots of people had

11:09a hand in that publication and you don't really know you know how that publication was particularly shaped by which particular people and um you know so yeah i mean it that's but that's all of that is all those complications are what make history fun to do thank you paul um given your experience um

Academic Writing Workshops

11:34as as an editor i would like to ask you these questions according to you what are some of the characteristics of a good editor of an academic journals or if you prefer you can turn it around and answer me what makes for a bad journal editor yeah um so if you're talking about the editor as in as in kevin um you know as opposed to someone like me who's just the managing editor um

12:07i think the first thing is that they need to be prompt they need to respond to submissions in a timely manner i mean we've all heard stories horror stories of submissions that sit on an editor's desk for you know several months only to have the editor desk reject them in an afternoon right um and that's that's just not good um so i think the first thing is is to to act promptly on what needs to be to be acted on um beyond that i mean i think they certainly need

12:41to be fair and they need to um they need to be they need to seek honest and open advice on papers that are submitted to the journal um in the case of a revise and resubmit i think a really good editor will guide the author through the referee reports so they'll say you know here are the things that you absolutely have to do here are the things that you can leave to your discretion um i think those were

13:15the things that uh that a good editor does um that a good editor should do um of of a journal

13:25so i've got a question about well have you do you have any funny stories that about about you know working in the journal publication process that you'd be willing to share with us so this question is actually from scott who's got a bone with to pick with a with an overzealous copy editor from his past so so one thing that that that we wanted to ask was so for instance as academic writers we've probably all had the unfortunate experience of working with for instance an overzealous copy editor

13:56scott talks about the time as time that a copy editor tried to correct the grammar of an epigram scott had taken from the grand inquisitor chapter of dostoevsky's brothers karamazov it's one of the most famous passages in the world literature and it's emphatically not in need of copy editing um do you have any stories like this and what advice would you give to copy editors who are inclined either to torture their writers prose or maybe not to torture it enough i wish i had a lot of funny stories um one

14:30that comes to mind is uh crawford goodwin who was the former editor of the journal before kevin the former editor of hope um who died in 2017 um he once told me that he wrote a paper on nassau senior

14:50and when it came back from the copy editor the last name senior had been changed to sr period in every case um so i remember that one i also remember um looking at a copy of the theory of moral moral sentiments by adam smith and the running head across the top of each page was the theory of mortal m-o-r-t-a-l

15:20sentiments so that was something that you know was missed in the editing um okay so

15:29i i i've had to deal with this with the with some of the people i work with at uh sage um and this is this is this is what i tell them so when you copy edit your first your primary responsibility your primary concerns are house style and consistency those are the primary concerns so make sure that you know references are formatted in the way that the journal wants them to be formatted making sure that names and words are spelled and capitalized

16:05consistently and according to house style throughout those kinds of things that's the first order of business beyond that um you need to be really careful so when i was when i was younger and less experienced i tended to over edit i'm going to make this great you know it's good but i'm going to really turn this into something that you know that's fantastic and that's just not unless you are asked to do that that is just not the copy editor's role i mean yes correct grammatical mistakes correct spelling

16:40errors correct factual errors if you happen to notice them but um you need to be you need to be really careful about editing and author's prose and less is basically more here um i try to do uh i try to intervene in the least way that i need to intervene um when i when i when i do these things um

17:10so i will say that the papers that i get today are a lot better written than the papers i got 25 years ago i suspect part of that is ai you know i know a lot of authors use ai to i saw your thumbs down jennifer uh a lot of them use ai um and of course my workshop no i'm just kidding

17:36but they are they do seem to be better written today or maybe i'm just not as good as i used to be i don't know maybe i just don't notice things like that that's ridiculous i don't know you know george gopen he was he's a retired professor professor of rhetoric at duke and he wrote this great book called expectations teaching writing from the reader's perspective um and uh he says in that book that the number one thing your reader the biggest mistake a reader makes is assuming that

18:08they understand what the author is trying to say and so that's kind of the approach that i take i'm much more likely to query than i am to just change something let's now move um to another subject the fact that you have been animating uh since years um on behalf of the journal of economic soot uh jihad uh for the last few years um academic writing workshops and i've been

18:42one of the many i think that followed uh this this workshop and so how how did the workshop come about and what and what service are they meant to provide to the community and what's your uh feeling about

Workshop Goals

18:57about it so the workshops began as i think it was 2018 or 2019 as one of the hes's new initiatives which is a program that the hes used to have and it was um proposed by pedro duarte um and and jimena who the previous editors of j hat um uh jimena hurtado and um they saw it as

19:33a the way that they were thinking about it was um j head is an english language journal a lot of the people who try to get published in j hat are not native english speakers we don't want that to be a barrier we want to make the journal more inviting and inclusive so let's let's offer some writing workshops as a way of doing that to help people improve their written english and that's how they started um and um and they've just continued i mean i had no idea

20:13that they were going to continue i really thought it was just going to be a one-year thing but then they decided to to continue the workshops um and so you know we've been doing it now for five or six years and i've been in touch with haro one of the current editors of j hat haro moss one of the current editors of j hat to uh figure out what we're gonna what we're gonna do this year um but um

20:40you know so so i haven't really developed a curriculum that i follow every year um i've kind of made it up as i go along but for the most part um it's it's i try to um explain how to write clearly and simply um i try to explain what academic articles are supposed to do um we've talked about writing for general audiences and how that differs from writing for an academic audience we've

21:13talked about making presentations um those kinds of things um i am one of the participator of that workshop i participated to many of these workshops uh because i'm turkish and i always had difficulties writing in english um actually first of all i would like to say that um they have a therapeutic effect this is like a little therapy these workshops always uh even though you for example it happened

21:48to me to participate uh two times to the same workshop because it's uh repetitive sometimes same subjects come out again uh it makes me feel really good and thank you very much we always thank you in the end of the workshops but now it's time to uh thank you in general because uh you you did it how many years it has happened uh for how many years now maybe franco said it but five or six years yeah thank you general i really appreciate that um i really do and um i mean i guess i guess what i should say is that um

22:28what i really hope so i'm glad i really appreciate what you just said because what i really hope is that by the end of the workshop the participants feel better about writing and about themselves as writers than they did at the beginning of the workshop that's that's that's what i hope to achieve you know um at all of these at all of these workshops and about the workshop actually all explanations uh in the workshops are clear and the workshop itself emphasizes the importance of clarity of the

23:03language um and that that's really helpful yes i got really help from this workshop i have a question i have another question um at what point in one's carrier should a young scholar start thinking about

Writing Quality

23:20the quality of their writing given the priority to become expert in the content of one's field matters of form like the quality of one's writing are often neglected in graduate school what advice do you give to new historians of economics about that well i think you should start thinking about your writing from the very beginning um and and not see it as a an activity that's separate from learning the content

23:51but it's something that goes hand in hand with learning the content so i think i think everybody should be writing as they're learning the content even if that means just after you read something you try to record and writing from memory what you've just read i mean that i do that all the time i mean that that could be a very valuable a valuable um a valuable practice to have um so yeah i think i think

24:26people should be writing from the get-go and should uh should should use writing as a way to to master the content that you're trying to master um

24:44there are there are some good books out there that can help you i mean there's a book by someone named wendy laura belcher and it's called writing your journal article in 12 weeks and she talks about the conventions of an academic article which is what a lot of people need to learn early on um and what you really you rarely get explicitly taught right you sort of learn this by

25:15reading the literature and through inferring from comments that your advisors give you and things like that um there's also a series of books that it's geared a little more towards social scientists but there's still a lot of valuable things in them it's but it's a series of books published by michigan by um um feak and swales john swales and christine feak feak she's it's it's a it's a it's a great it's a great great series um

25:51and i think the thing to under you know i think the thing to when when you're starting out i think the thing to do is to commit to getting better and and let me just explain what i mean by that nobody expects you well nobody reasonably expects you to know how to do it right from the beginning this is something that you will learn over time um and so give yourself that time think about it as a process think about it as something that you're going to spend the rest of your career

26:24uh getting better at um commit yourself to that process and and i think um i think that's the way to go i mean i think that's the way to look at it could i jump in with a follow-up question

26:41yeah okay i was actually wondering um

26:46we've you've said a bit about when basically we should think about the quality of our writing right away and kind of just all the time um one thing that i was curious about was how writers should

Cultivating Voice

27:00cultivate voice in their writing this is something that i think about um in my own field where um there are certain kinds of moves that we make in papers that i see over and over again and sometimes i worry for myself um whether the way i talk about things is going to get lost um you know under this set of constraints that i really have to be operating under so what do you do you have any advice for for students who are thinking about cultivating that as part of good quality writing

27:35cultivating cultivating cultivating your voice as a writer um so i mean what i what i do is um

27:51i take a writer that i really like like george orwell or susan sontag um and when i write i try to write like them and of course i'm not going to succeed i'm not going to write just like them um i'm going to inevitably write like me but with their voice in my head um that's i mean it's sort of like an inspiration it's it's it's it's a model to strive for i know

28:30i'm not going to reach it i don't even know if i want to reach it right i want my own voice um but it's extremely helpful i think to um for me it's been extremely helpful to get really familiar with a particular writer that you like um and have that have the voice of that writer in your head as you write your own stuff um and i don't think you have to worry about oh i'm going to sound like susan

29:03sontag well if i do sound like susan sontag i'm going to be ecstatic but it's not going to happen i'm going to sound like somebody else but you know it's it's it gives you a basis to start from um and you know i i i think the more that you the more that you write and the more familiar writing is to you as a is as something that you do i mean i just think i think whatever voice you have

29:34is is going to come out is going to be developed that's what i think um i can't prove that you know but that's what i think who i was i was reading someone the other day

29:51gosh who was it it was the weirdest thing but but um

29:57but but but he he said that before he ever writes whenever he writes i'm sorry i can't remember who this person is but i do remember that they said they always read something from marks before they write because it it sort of preps their mind in the way that they want to be prepped and i guess that's kind of what i'm talking about okay so it's also an invitation to read and um uh even not only academic writing

30:29um yes i mean yeah i think i i think that it's important to to read people who are general essayists who write very well um yeah thanks so still on academic writing uh in your view what is the relationship between technique and substance does a good technique lend itself to convincing argument or can weak style undermine the substance of a piece

31:04how do you feel about this tension well i definitely think

31:12skillful writing can be persuasive even if what you're saying is not true um i mean think about fiction writers right i mean a good fiction writer you know that these events didn't happen but you kind of believe that they did you know i mean it's like a it's like a it's like a trick right it's like a trick um so yes i definitely believe that that that good writing can um can make

31:44your ideas more persuasive i mean i've been i i i i really like john stewart mill um i love reading mill i think he's brilliant i think he's we we can never we can't pay too much attention to mill as far as i'm concerned and you know i'm not you know so take the essay on liberty right do i really believe a central argument maybe i mean but the way that he says it as i'm reading it i do believe it

32:20and it's so it's all because of the way that he that he that he writes and i can't really put my finger on it but there's a certain intelligence and style to the way that he writes that for me makes it persuasive i mean that's probably one reason why smith was so influential is is he he's generally a good writer and that's probably one reason why it was him and the wealth of nations and not you know there are lots of books that basically say the same things but we don't

32:50they're kind of lost to history well they're not lost to us but the history in general um but yeah i mean i so yeah i i and by the same token francois i think you know something poorly written

33:05you know your regardless of how fantastic your ideas might be or original they are or intriguing or compelling if something is poorly written you're probably not going to succeed in in convincing people um you know there's that story that that mccluskey tells in the rhetoric of economics about the mooth article right where she she basically says that the reason it took so long to get to have an influence is because it was so poorly written i don't know if that's entirely true but

33:39i'm sure that's part of it i mean that that it was written in a way that that wasn't ready for its readers at that moment um and had he written it a different way who knows maybe it would have been recognized sooner um okay just changing the subject a little bit um to come to more popular

AI and Writing

34:02questions maybe how does ai affect writing and editing in the history of economic talks should we use it or so how and how not so if we're talking about generative ai um you know jennifer get ready for your your thumbs down here i'm i'm open-minded i'm giving i'm giving it a thumbs down too but up but um

34:33i i i mean it's it's going to become a normal part of the writing process um probably sooner than we think maybe within five years um and so what it means to write what it means to be original um what it what it means to um to be a scholar all of that stuff is going to have to be um rethought um my my primary concern with generative ai is that we're going to

35:13let it do our thinking for us you know i think that's a lot of people's concerns um because you know i i really believe that thinking through and writing through a problem is one of the important ways that we develop as human beings and i think if we abdicate that if we look if we if we outsource that to ai we're just going to be all the poor for it um i'm not very optimistic now if we're talking

35:45about general artificial intelligence um then i think we i mean that's even scarier right i mean so i'll listen to you know the big davos meeting every year where all the billionaires gather and you know um so uh yuval harari uh spoke there about ai and it's it's a fantastic talk i mean it's he began by saying um the first thing you need to know is that this is not a tool this is an agent and as an

36:21agent it has the potential to take over everything we do that involves words religion scholarship

36:30business you name it um and i mean i suspect he's right i mean i i guess so i don't know i mean i don't i don't fully know um but it worries me um it really worries me um but yeah as far as generative ai you know i wish people didn't use it but they do they're going to continue using it it's going to become part of the normal writing process and when it does uh we're going to have to completely

37:01rethink um what it means to be an author what it means to write what it means to be original all those kinds of things and what that's going to look like i don't know i don't i don't know what the answers are going to be to those to those questions it often happens that a person writing in history has a lot of material a lot of good ideas but doesn't know how to get these ideas on paper or how to arrange them in a convincing way do you have advice about how a writer should even get started

37:33and we're not including using generative ai we're going to take it off the table for now um what about yeah what advice do you have for writers who are struggling to turn all this good material into good writing well i think it starts with articulating in a single sentence what your main point or argument is um and um that that's where it all starts and then you follow that up by listing the pieces of evidence you have that make you think that that's true or reasonable

38:09and that's how you begin to get a handle on on these things um

38:17there are also i haven't explored these but but your question uh has made me think about them so roger backhouse's biography of samuelson um i you know i've read it um what one of the interesting things is in the preface and this completely took me by surprise at the end of the preface he says that the book was written with the help of scrivener which is a software program and he says it did more

38:50for him than any normal word processing programs could do um so you know there there there are now things like that out there that can help you that are specifically designed to help you organize material um i think they're they're mostly used by fiction writers but but obviously um scholars can use them can use them as well um um i have scrivener oh you do do you use i do yeah i used to use it a lot i i used to use it a lot

39:21i use it less now i for whatever reason i've replaced scrivener which is like this wonderful program where you can put all of your stuff kind of just in one place what research you're doing your drafts your your rewritings of re of drafts and all that just kind of in one place i have a for whatever reason i moved to an even more inefficient strategy which we don't have to get into so i don't know why i moved away from it but it is a lovely program well that's good to hear steve madama uses something too it might be scrivener as well but it might be something different um but

39:55i know that he's told me that he uses and i emailed him to ask him but i i didn't have time to check to see if he responded um have you ever seen that that clip of david lynch talking about how to write a screenplay because that might be relevant here he says here's how you write a screenplay you get a pack of three by five index cards which most people probably don't know what those are anymore you get a pack of three by five index cards on each card you write a scene and when you have 70 cards

40:29you have a script and maybe that approach can work for the person who's trying to organize an abundant supply of material okay um now um for the last question uh we would like to ask you what are your

Pet Peeves

40:48pet peeves about academic writing what annoys you when you see it what are the what are some of the tendencies of academic writers writers that you hope to never encounter again well i'll talk about a couple of sentence level things that are pet peeves of mine one is the fact that whenever there are two items in a series the author feels obligated to use a both and construction so i commend the creators of this

41:29podcast for not naming it both smith smith and marx walk into a bar

41:37because i think if that sentence occurred in an academic article both would be in there somewhere um so both both and is actually supposed to be used for emphasis use sparingly for emphasis when you really want to stress that it's not just one or the other it's both but if you overuse it which people do it loses that function um the other one and mccluskey talks about this in her economical writing is the the overuse of that those this and these when in most cases a simple the will do um so those are

42:16those are those are those are two things um looking at it from a bigger perspective um you know there's the there's the conventions of an academic article um which is i mean basically what you have to do is situate your question in the context of the secondary literature that's how that's that's basically what the introduction of the article does i mean that's something that you have

42:51to do that if you want to get published um should you have to do that is that really the you know is is that really something that is desirable i mean i i don't know i mean if you if you look at non-academic essays and are better well probably in any magazine i mean none of them will begin with a discussion of what other people have written about the subject none of them will begin with

43:24the equivalent of this paper um this essay will provide a profile of uval harari you know you just wouldn't see that so um you know as long as we insist on these conventions you have to follow them but sometimes those conventions are i just think oh my god can't we figure out other ways to start an academic paper so that's my that's those are some of my the last one's not really a pet peeve but

43:57it's just an observation pet peeve of mine so it's a pet peeve of yours yeah it is well so so here's a here's the thing that i i see a lot in philosophy papers and it's reinforced because i mean like even i do it um but there's always a paragraph at the end of the introduction of a philosophy paper that's like in section one i'm going to do this and then in section two i'm going to do this and then in section three and then section four will conclude and it's like oh i didn't know that that's very

44:31common in economics papers and history of economics papers i didn't know that that was common in philosophy as well at least in the circles i run in it's it's very very common and i'm i'm starting to chafe at it a little bit by the way audience members audience members can't see this but once you mentioned note cards fresco i got really really excited started waving all of his note cards around in the background video i did not see that i'm sorry i missed that look at all of his note cards you're like david lynch i like index cards good yeah yeah you know we never answered the question

45:10about changes in the field i don't know if you want to do that or not oh yeah we can totally go back to that of course i'd like to know well um so you know i started with the journal in 1999 and i think a lot of the changes that have occurred uh since then were already underway in 1999 um i think the biggest i'm not going to call this a big one of the far-reaching changes is just the decline in numbers

45:40of historians of economics in the u.s in north america and the uk and i was thinking about this when i started in 1999 we had of course there were the guys at duke there was crawford there was neil there was roy but at wake forest there was dan hammond a guy named alan cottrell a guy named mike lawler at uncg the university of north carolina greensboro there was bruce caldwell at unc there was a guy

46:11named vincent terrasio um and so you know just in north carolina when i first started there were like seven or eight historians of economics within 50 miles of where of where i sat and now it's basically just well spencer's now what spencer bonds office at north carolina state um now we're happy to have him in the area um but you know i i i looked at the editorial board of hope as it existed in 1999

46:43and like half of the 20 board members were north americans or brits um and now it's like two or three and one of those is from france so you know uh so that that's so so that's been a big shift um it's all shifted you know i mean it's always been done in europe and south america and asia now it's exclusively done i think in almost exclusively not exclusively almost exclusively done in europe uh south america and asia so so there's been that kind of shift um

47:17other things i've seen um and again i think these changes were underway in in 1999 um but certainly the use of archival materials things other than the published record so journals diaries photographs letters um minutes of meetings um those those kinds of things um that that's that that has um increased um the focus on post-war economics i think is is something i mean if you look at the older issues of

47:53hope it's all ricardo and volros and marx and smith and canes and you know you don't really see but of course you know what's interesting is you know post-war economics is now like i mean 1970 was 55 years ago you know no it wasn't it was 30 years ago so you know yeah right so it's not it's not it's not as recent as as you might think if you didn't bother to you know work out the the chronology

48:24um so that's been a that's been a shift um the attention paid to non north american and uk economists um so a lot of south american economists um european economists of course um that's that i i think that's been a that's been a big change in the field um we're beginning to look at economists not just as they function as academics but you know in think tanks and government and

48:58business and and things like that so um that's been a change and of course the there's been a change in in the hope conference volume that's coming out at the end of this year edited by philippe fontan and joel isaac their introduction is all about how um now it's not just just not just economists who are writing about the history of economics it's people from you know history proper and science studies

49:29and intellectual history and and folks like that um so those are those are you know some of the changes that that i've that i've seen i think they were all underway starting in you know when i started with the journal in 1999. does that sound does that all sound does that all like sound reasonable to you all yeah it does absolutely um i think the field is a lot more exciting now than it ever was before

50:01i mean we andre's forensic was at the hope center a couple of years ago and when he was there he

50:11well i love andre when he was there he read the entire run of hope like from the first issue to the the most current issue and i said uh what'd you think of the early stuff he goes it was boring

50:29well the best is yet to come so that's right well you know i think you know a lot of the early stuff it was a lot of it was what did volros mean by value or you know what exactly was smith's labor theory of value and that kind of stuff um um you didn't have as much of the contextual you know studies that i think you have today and that's probably what he was reacting to um you know i think too there's there's this there's now a sensitivity or awareness that economists

51:03you know i think before we would treat these people as discrete individuals um and and there's much more awareness now that they were members of various communities and those communities affected their work influenced their work those kinds of things

51:22awesome well thank you so much paul i learned something new whenever i talk to you so thank you for stopping by the show and visiting us here today well it was really my pleasure i really enjoyed this um thank you so much for your questions and for your support of the workshop and for doing this podcast because i as someone who for a short while um it's a lot of work it's a lot of work but i was one of the participants of the of the workshop and i keep the documents that you have

51:54sent it to us uh and powerpoint but for me what was really important that it was clear and it was

52:05really like we are like little children there because we are on that subject and as we have difficulties it was very pedagogical and uh very empathic actually i found all the workshops like that and i really thank you well thank you so much and i'll i'll try to keep doing a good job and here's a really quick plug for our audience members those of you who are interested or we know who's someone someone who's interested j hat runs the online writing workshop paul uh spearheads this um we're hoping

52:40for for a long time to come it's a it's a good experience learn how to write and yeah well like i said i'll be i'll i'll be i've been conferring with haru to figure out what we're going to be doing this year you know thank you all and and this is really this is really a delight to to be on on the podcast

53:11join us again next month for another episode of smicks and marks walk into a bar a history of economics podcast