Episode Ninety Five

Introduction

0:00Welcome to Smith and Mark's Walk Into a Bar, a history of economics podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Jennifer Jun, and I'm joined here today by Francois Alisson. Hi, Francois. And Francois's cat. Yeah. Hello, Jennifer. I'm with my cat, Olympe, today, working from home, and I'm happy to be with you. Mid of semester now, yeah. And Jinla Akdere is here as well. Hi,

0:36Jinla. You're at the office. Yes, I had my classes in the morning. Hello, everyone. And then it's a regular work day. It's a Friday, though, actually. I'm happy that it's a Friday. It's not totally a regular day because it's a Friday, but I'm at my office, actually, and not at home with my cat.

Literature Episode

1:00Happy to see you today. Happy to see you, too. Today, we've got our literature episode. And on these episodes, what we do is each one of us reads a piece from a journal article from the last one or two years, something that's very recent that we find interesting. And today's the day we talk about these interesting things that we've been reading. And so Francois is up first to tell us about what he's learned. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jen. So for today's literature review episode,

1:37I've picked up a piece from the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, which is a nice journal online. And in its second issue of 2024, volume 17, number two, they made a special issue on democratic economic planning, a topic I'm currently teaching and I'm working on, and I'm working on on different kinds of planning. And I saw that this paper by Angus Hebenton and Martin O'Neill,

2:15two political philosophers, entitled Freedom, State and Market, the real worlds of economic planning, offers a refreshing view on the topic. Because precisely, they challenge the dominant binary view that sees market and planning as mutually exclusive. And they invite us to explore the more

2:45complex real worlds of planning that is historical and yet to enrich our historical and theoretical models that combines planning with market mechanism in democratic context, because that's the topic of the special issue. And so they try to go beyond the model that we have in mind of a totalitarian, authoritarian, centralist, common system like the Soviet model, or the completely utopian alternatives

3:23to market that are difficult to figure out not how they could work, but how we could go to them. And in this, in this way, the article, I found it interesting for three reasons. The first is that it reclaims planning as a democratic tool, because planning is often dismissed as incompatible with freedom. And here, the author showed that it is not necessarily the case, how to coordinate investment,

3:58address inequality, or respond to ecological crisis without abolishing markets is a theoretical and historical possibility. And by doing that, they revisit what they called overlooked thinkers. They are maybe not that overlooked for us, historians of economic thought, but James Mead, Stuart Holland, and especially the case of Barbara, the case of Barbara Wooten, who in the 40s, tried to raise a case for planning, by responding directly to Friedrich Hayek. And the third reason is that it raises the question that when we are thinking about economic planning,

4:53as historian of economic thought, we might sometimes overlook the democratic aspect of it. And I think that this is, this is quite interesting. So I will not dwell into all the details of the paper that I've read, but I can just say maybe that what is interesting is the most interesting are perhaps the two sections on Barbara, perhaps the two sections on Barbara Wooten's and the fact that she, yeah, she explains how freedom is not something just formal, but it should also, you should also think of freedom as a material,

5:40as a material in its material in its materiality. And the second issue is that planning does not necessarily eliminate choice. Even in planning economies, individual can still choose what to consume, where to work or how to live. It all depends how we built this mixed economy that is a mix between planned and market-based economy. And so I think that these recent trends inserting mixed economies, both in theoretical constructions and historical events is something that gives salt for food, food for salt. And so I think I will leave it here, unless you have a question to ask me.

Discussion of Francois's Paper

6:32I've got a question to ask me. I've got a couple of questions, if that's okay. Yeah. So the first one is, you mentioned this distinction between the formality versus the materiality of freedom. What does that distinction amount to? Oh, it is, it necessitates, for example, to, to, to, to include in the choice, for example, when, when you, when you give the prominence to consumer sovereignty, then you, you believe that you give the most choice to the people.

7:12Uh, but if you don't take into account, uh, some social issues like income inequality, then you don't see how this consumer sovereignty might be biased, uh, just because of an issue of purchasing power, um, inequalities. And so material freedom means, do you have the capability to exercise, uh, to exercise your freedom? And in that sense, um, yeah, it is something that goes back to the debates of the 19th century between liberals and socialists about, uh, different kinds of freedom.

7:54And you mentioned that this is something, uh, related to the class that you're teaching right now. And I was also wondering if it was related to, uh, your research interests as well, and whether you were also frustrated with positing a sharp dichotomy between markets and planning. I mean, yeah, both in my research and teaching, when I have to explain, uh, for instance, that, that the French planning system was a kind of indicative planning, you should always be very careful because even in, in the French system, you had some, such strong, um, strong, um, authoritarian, um,

8:42planning in the sense that if you have, for example, foreign exchange controls, then it means that, uh, you are, um, more authoritative than, than just giving incitation, uh, indicative. And so most, I mean, as soon as you approach real world planning, uh, traditions, like in India, in France, in, in Japan, uh, or in, in a lot of countries where sometimes we forgot that there were five year plans or four year plans.

9:12Uh, then you, you, you, you realize that you are always in a mix of markets and planning, and this does not correspond to most of the theoretical debates that you can find among, among planning. And so it's, I, I, I don't find this paper as a paper that solves the issues, but that's more sets an agenda in which I'm willing to engage myself.

Jennifer's Paper

9:40Fantastic. Thanks, Francois. Um, I'm next up, uh, I'm going to be talking about a paper that came out in 2025 this year in the Journal of Economic Methodology called To Change or Not to Change the Evolution of Forecasting Models at the Bank of England. And it's got a lot of authors. It's by Aurelien Goudsmit, Francesco Sergi, Beatrice Cherrier, Juan Acosta, Clément Fontaine, and Francois Clavo. So hopefully I did not butcher any of your names. And if I did, I'm, I apologize. Um, and I picked this paper because unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also working.

10:21I think when this maybe was impressed or was being written or whatever, I was actually also working on a paper about the modeling practices deployed at the Bank of England not too long ago. And in particular, how the current compass baseline model got used, but from a philosophy of science perspective, and this is a paper that this is like the historical paper that I wish I had written. It really does a lovely job of tracking the way that different models have been used or have persisted at the Bank of England over the past 50 years up to including the compass model that's currently used.

10:55And I like it because there's this naive story that we could tell about the way science progresses. Um, but if we, his, if we're serious about the history and philosophy and methodology of science, it never actually looks quite as simple as you might think. So you might think that scientific model just goes through a cycle of being formulated, being tested, and in the recalcitrant case being corrected and replaced. And, you know, just going through this over and over, or maybe you might get something like the Cunian revolution, the Cunian paradigms type of story.

11:27But, um, it's not like the seventies happened and people said, Oh no, we, we just need something new. Let's see what we can cook up. Um, but we're being serious historians here. It turns out the way models get constructed, get changed and get preserved over time is a much more complicated affair than just a matter of getting the facts of, of economic life, right or wrong. And just responding to, um, responding to the cases in which we get it wrong. The paper itself contains four episodes from the 1972 in-house model that persisted into the eighties to the nineties, when we get the medium term macro model, the MTMM to the bank of England quarterly model in the two thousands.

12:10And finally the compass model in the two thousands and the authors identify at least three factors, uh, which we get some combination of in each of these episodes that contributes to the reasons why the models look the way they do. And these three factors are modelers agency. So for instance, the banks economists relationship, which was fraught with, with, uh, the people in the treasury, uh, to the institutional features that play both direct and indirect and three material factors like infrastructure funding and so on.

12:43Um, but none of these has anything directly to do with like the predictive success of a model and they don't come in any particular pattern of combinations. Um, so for instance, uh, with the medium term macro model, there were both theoretical and organizational reasons why that was introduced. So it was, it was of reduced size, which made it more manageable. Um, it was wanted to focus on certain things like how to target inflation.

13:13Um, and on the other hand, something like compass, how that came about, um, was for a couple of, for a few reasons. So, um, it's not that models aren't responsive to the way things turn out in the world. The financial crisis was one reason we get what we have today. And the previous model, the bank of England quarterly model, B E Q M wasn't what, uh, philosophers would call fit for purpose anymore. It couldn't say very much about quantitative easing for instance. Um, but we don't get something entirely different from the B E Q M model.

13:45And we don't get something that merely corrects it in some ad hoc way. Um, and it turns out also in contemporary practice, the compass model isn't alone in the economist toolbox. There's now a suite of models that it lives with and compass is just one of them. And economists use several models, a lot of models together, uh, depending on what kind of problem they're facing. And so I really enjoyed this paper a lot. It brought to life models and modeling rather than just examining their epistemological import insofar as explanation or prediction or whatever is concerned.

14:20Um, and I really love that this paper also leaned heavily on interviews. Uh, there were these passages where different economists are pretty clearly complaining about each other behind each other's backs, which I thought was really hilarious. And so this is a paper that I would really recommend to anybody who's working on philosophy of modeling in the social sciences as a historical supplement. Fantastic. Fantastic. Very interesting.

Discussion of Jennifer's Paper

14:45Thank you, Jennifer. Um, can I ask you a question about that paper? Because, um, um, what is unclear from your presentation for me is how much the interviews focus on, on, on, um, on those who make the model and those who use the model and whether these are the same people. Or in another way, if there is a clear boundary between the academic sphere and the policy sphere, and whether the central banks in these, uh, episode are, uh, one or the other or both.

15:25I don't know if you can help me. Yeah, I feel like this is a complicated question. So I think the, the gist of, of the, the spirit of your question is really this, um, question about like, how does the science and the policy, uh, go together and how do they cooperate or, or not cooperate sometimes even. Right. Um, and part of what this paper does is track how fraught that relation sometimes is. It's not always the case that, you know, the scientists come up with their model and then they just send it over to the policy making body and then they use it.

15:59Right. Um, one of these things that these, uh, one thing that these interviews bring to light is that, that negotiation is, there's no particular pattern to it. As far as I can tell, like what those historical specific patterns, the way that transaction works. Um, and it's always, it's not always an easy, uh, handoff either. Um, and so that was one thing that I really liked about this paper was that it complicated and problematized this, uh, science policy distinction that you're pointing at here.

16:31And, um, and, um, yeah. Um, have you already noticed this trend, um, of having multiple author based papers in, in, in our field? I, we, I don't see it often in philosophy. Um, it's, I see, I see coauthored papers pretty often, but not papers with seven different authors and pulling together. Pulling together so much material. Um, so I, I just thought it was a very impressive paper that told like a really compelling story. Uh, and that was one of the reasons why I liked it so much. Um, I don't know, maybe one day I, too, we'll try to get along with six people all at the same time, but we'll see.

17:19We should ask them probably, uh, whether, whether they want to make it again or not. That's true. That's true.

Cynla's Paper

17:25And last but not least, we've got Cynla Akdere. What, what have you been reading?

17:34Uh, thank you, Jen. Uh, I also have a wonderful, interesting paper next to me, uh, which is a recent paper also. Uh, it is published in history of political economy journal, uh, recently, uh, and, uh, the title of the paper is, uh, Piero Serafa and Contrafactuals, uh, very unusual title, uh, and, uh, the whole title is, uh, Piero Serafa and Contrafactuals, a view from Serafa's unpublished papers in the late nine, late 1920s.

18:10The paper's authors are Heinz Kurs, Neri Salvadori, and Rodolfo Signorino. Uh, why I choose that paper? Actually, it was a very personal choice. Uh, I would like to explain, um, um, some, um, some real life, uh, moments, uh, with you because, uh, it's all about that. Actually, in 2010, Heinz Kurs gives a seminar in Paris in the locals of Université Pantheon Assas, Université Pantheon Assas in Paris.

18:49Uh, at that time, I was PhD student, uh, living in Paris, and I knew that Heinz Kurs comes to Paris often because, uh, he is, uh, with Gilbert Facarello, uh, is editing handbook of history of economic analysis that come out in three volumes afterward. Uh, it's a huge work, uh, it's a huge work, actually, and I can see that it takes time, so he comes, uh, often, uh, at that time, he was giving this speech, uh, in University Pantheon Assas, and he was talking about Contrafactuals.

19:26In 2010, uh, in 2010, uh, I was familiar, uh, with the subject, why, uh, actually, uh, I was, uh, writing my thesis on John Stuart Mill, as you know, and while I was preparing my PhD thesis on Mill, uh, I had to work on his study of causality. Uh, Mill, uh, uh, I recognized that it was a philosophy of science, and not only a political economist, and it happened to me to work on, uh, that subject, which was very new for me, and I had, of course, difficulty.

20:04It happened to me to work on truth value of the antecedents, which is not a subject in economics, so I was really, uh, struggling and dealing with all these, um, uh, uh, subjects related to philosophy of science, and the truth value of antecedents, for me, at that time, uh, was a very difficult subject, but, uh, I was dealing with, actually, I was trying to understand, uh, the meaning and the usage of antecedents, uh, in philosophy of science and in economics, uh, while, uh, when I hear, uh,

20:42Heinz Kurs, uh, pronouncing the term antecedents, uh, I was excited, uh, I was excited, and also, uh, this, uh, work on antecedents brought me to counterfactual thinking already at that time, and in his speech, actually, he was talking about counterfactuals, and I'm trying to understand what he means, and why he's talking about all that stuff, and actually, uh, and actually, that day, I asked a question to Heinz Kurs, I don't remember what was the question I asked, but I remember that I was very excited,

21:19and actually, uh, and actually, uh, and actually, uh, I was really, it was a success for me to be able to formulate a question already on counterfactuals, I don't think it was, uh, specifically on Serafa, because he was giving a speech on Serafa, and Serafa's interest on counterfactuals, actually, which was, uh, uh, actually, uh, a subject that has ever, even, uh, even, uh, I mean, I've never, uh, heard about such a subject, and I think the public, uh, was also a little bit surprised, and very interested, and excited, uh, about that talk.

21:54That's the reason why I chose that paper. That's, I, I should explain first that. When I saw that paper, I remembered that day, and I really wanted to read that paper. The paper says that the truth value of antecedent is an open, open question in economics, of course. Contrafactuals may have true antecedents and may not have true antecedents. What means true antecedents, for example, in economics?

22:25These expressions actually, uh, touches a little bit the subject, uh, I, subjects I visited at the end of my PhD, and I have, uh, a part, a subsection in my PhD on counterfactuals, because I had to understand what, uh, don't start meals is talking about, and I had to study that subject, uh, in the context, uh, of science and economics. Jan, you asked me some questions. Actually, I will try to answer your questions, but first, I will try to answer your second question,

Discussion of Cynla's Paper

22:58and then I will try to answer your first question. Uh, your first question is actually, uh, about the, um, value and, and, uh, the interest of this paper, because this paper is interested and based, is based on archival materials, uh, which is not, uh, open yet to the public, uh, and I have to mention, uh, that specificity of the paper first, uh, in 2010, actually, I find out that in 2010,

23:34uh, um, at the, the, the year where Kurs gives the speech in Universite Panteon Assas, uh, was, actually, he was there also, uh, as the chief editor of, uh, um, Serafa's archives, uh, and he writes that paper also, uh, as somebody who edited, actually, uh, the, uh, unpublished work of Serafa, uh, and these archives exist in Cambridge University,

24:06of course, uh, and, uh, at that year, I find out that, oh, well, just, just a second, I have also, uh, to say that, Heinz Kurs is also the editors of, editor of many critical, and many books and papers on, uh, Serafa and Cambridge controversies, uh, he is also the editor of critical essays on Piero Serafa's legacy in economics, which came out, uh, in 2000, and, actually, uh, authors of, author of many other books and papers on the subject.

24:40Uh, I find out that Cambridge Journal of Economics has organized a workshop under the title New Perspectives on the Work of Piero Serafa in 2010. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh

25:22the famous book, Production of Commodities with Commodities, and they created a special issue which was published in 2012. Well, that's to answer your question on archives. It is actually very important that a paper actually uses some archives.

25:53Of course, the archives, I believe, if we go and want to see the archives, we could. But for instance, it's not open to the public. You also asked me another question, in this case, about the core problems, research questions treated by the paper. If I think actually Serafa was onto something in terms of when certain sort of counterfactual reasonings were appropriate or not,

26:31Serafa's view doesn't seem to have overcome the marginalist alternative. Yes, Serafa is bothered by some usage of counterfactuals, and I'll try to explain that now. And actually, this paper, because this paper is really about this usage of counterfactuals by neoclassical theory. For me, actually, this paper is about the scientific validity of scientific explanations.

27:04Neoclassical theory is a scientific theory and proposes some scientific explanations. So when we question its usage of counterfactuals, here we also question the scientific validity of scientific explanations of neoclassical theory and what Serafa does actually in his life. This present article focuses on Serafa's work in the late 1920s and early 1930s especially, and they use, actually, the paper uses some unpublished papers.

27:43Yes, first thing is first, Serafa never ever used the term counterfactual, which is actually important. I have to say it because the paper says it, which is not me, the paper put it very clearly. Serafa did not use the term counterfactual, because the term at that time was not yet on vogue, even in philosophy, and become so only in the 1970s.

28:16And how and when, and especially how, thanks to who, the term became popular. I will answer that question first, before the paper, because I was interested on the subject and studied the subject a little bit. But there is one man, David Lewis, who contributed to linguistics and also logic, and I brought, his book's name is Contrafactuals, and I bought that book.

28:46And I brought the book with me today, here to show you. And because this book is a tough book, it's not very heavy, but it's not easy to understand for an economist. It's a big challenge, it was a big challenge at that time for me, so I wanted to, so you are very far away, so you cannot touch the book and go look inside the book right now. But even though you do it, it's very difficult to understand anything written in the book.

29:20I understand the first sentence, because the first sentence is the famous example of Contrafactual, which begins, the book begins with that sentence. And this is actually the universal example of the Contrafactuals here. If you don't believe me, I can show you. If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over. And it's so sweet, because it's about kangaroos, but a very nice, sweet animal. I like kangaroos. And then it seemed to me very sweet and nice. Then, unfortunately, the rest of the book is not that easy to understand.

30:01It's a heavy linguistic stuff in it. And actually, it was really a big challenge for me. And, well, I wrote the subsection of my PhD thesis, but, you know, I had no courage to work on it afterward. Kangaroos. Kangaroos, yes. If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over. That's a Contrafactual sentence, a Contrafactual. Kangaroos. Kangaroos. And I found reference, of course, to David Lewis, in the paper written by Kurs and Neri Salvadore and Signorino.

30:38And now, actually, this is the example of Contrafactual. So before I give you a definition of Contrafactual, I gave a definition – I just gave an example of The definition which was given in the paper belonged to Collins and Paul, 2004. A counterfactual is a conditional sentence in the subjunctive mood. The term counterfactual or, contrary to fact, conditional carries the suggestion that the antecedent of such a conditional is false.

31:13See, this is dark rooms of philosophy of science. Consider, and in the paper, there are also some examples of counterfactuals. If this glass had been struck, then it would have shattered. The implication is that the glass was actually, actually not struck and did not shatter. Like kangaroos, they have tails and they don't topple over.

31:43But what says the counterfactual, if kangaroos had no tails, so in this case, as in the example given in the paper, if this glass had been struck, then it would have shattered. I mean, the glass was actually not struck and did not shatter, yet these conditions are actually mentioned in that sentence. Well, okay, that's the dark and difficult universe of counterfactuals, but now I have to talk about the paper, and the paper is the story of Amartya Sen's attention on Serafa's remarks on counterfactuals.

32:25And Amartya Sen knows that he never mentioned the term in the work, in his work, but he says that in his daily life, actually, Serafa uses counterfactuals. And even he says that there is actually one sentence made by Serafa, that if life without counterfactuals would not be bearable. So then that intrigues Amartya Sen, and he wanted to understand actually what bothers Serafa about counterfactuals.

33:06And he actually was in dialogue with Serafa in 1950s, and he collected these conversations with Serafa, and actually he wanted to understand the actually critic of counterfactuals, usage of counterfactuals by Marshall. So, based on these dialogues, yes, there is a criticism of the marginalist neoclassical theory of value and distribution, which was actually erected upon and actually stood or fell with the acceptability of the particular kind of counterfactual reasoning.

33:53Yes, the paper is all that about Serafa's philosophical suspicion of the invoking of counterfactual magnitudes in factual descriptions, and did not find that the use of counterfactuals involved difficulties that purely observational propositions did not. Here, actually, here, actually, Serafa recognized that, yes, I already told that in ordinary life we use counterfactuals, if life would have been unbearable with such abstinence.

34:28But, actually, Serafa is very critical, its usage, towards its usage as a methodological divide. Well, to conclude all that, I have to say that what really bothers him, what is actually the problem with counterfactuals, if that they are not representing, they are not dealing with observational, observable, sorry, observable facts.

35:05And here, Serafa is much more focused on what we can observe, dealing with, you know, very famous questions he deals with, like theory of value, definition of relative prices, etc., or constant returns to the scales, etc. And Serafa, and Serafa, and Serafa, scrutinized Marshall's partial equilibrium analysis, again, is the background of a general analysis that takes into account an entire system of production.

35:40And he doesn't like these what if, like theory of what if, like theory of a general analysis, and he doesn't like these what if questions, counterfactuals are expressing some what if questions, and actually, for example, how would the price obtained and the quantity produced be affected if demand for the commodity under consideration changed? This is a what-if question. Serafa shows that in the cases like that, Marshall's analysis come up with wrong results.

36:17Okay, if I don't stop now, I will never be able to stop. I highly recommend the paper for those who work on economic epistemology and the rhetoric of economics, the connection between philosophy of science and economics, on the methodology of neoclassical economics, etc., etc. It's a very challenging and interesting paper to read. Thank you.

36:50Thanks, Jinla. You're right. David Lewis is really hard. I assigned David Lewis to my graduate students for our metaphysics and epistemology pro seminar. I mean, it's always fun, but it's always hard. One thing that I kind of wanted to ask was, it's a little bit of a sideways question. So I did not, I think about counterfactuals a lot, and I think about causation a lot. But Serafa was not someone that, I mean, I didn't even know about Serafa until like pretty late in life.

37:23And it was only quite recently that I, especially with this paper, actually, that I realized he was really concerned about questions of causation, how to think about causation in the context of your economic theory. Do you think that maybe we should be reading more Serafa? I mean, like, he's, he's giving us an alternative picture about, about what our economic theory, like what that relationship between our economic theory and counterfactual reasoning should look like. Yeah, should we, should we be reading more Serafa than we are now?

37:55Well, Serafa in 1960s, he published his books, famous books, famous book, production of commodities by commodities. And to answer your question, actually, I will tell you the problems he is dealing with at that time. And if you are dealing with Serafa's book, and if you are not dealing with these problems, maybe not, because Serafa's writing is not on methodology.

38:30He's just dealing with hardcore economic problems that were not able to be solved by classical economists like Ricardo. So, it's, it's already a very core problems of economic theory that hasn't been resolved. And he's very courageous of going back to 19th century's problem and start to deal with them.

39:01Two problems he had in his mind. First one is the theory of value. The theory of value had been designed to solve one concern with the explanation of relative prices at a given time and place. Ricardo couldn't define relative prices at a given time and place because, you know, first economists are dealing mostly on the problems related to agricultural production. And at that time, industrial production is new and on its way.

39:37And when, for example, comparison relative prices between one agriculture production and one industrial production, actually the model doesn't really fit. The model they have created doesn't really fit well to that kind of problems. The other problem Serafa has in his mind is an explanation of the change of prices over time. So, here, time has entered into the question of economic theory.

40:13And you know that Marshall will be very much concerned with the question of time. Short run, long run, he will then, I mean, time is the most difficult question of physics and philosophy of science also. And Marshall found a way to deal with time, talking about, you know, short run, long run, and which input will be stable and not stable through time.

40:46Finally, and Serafa was very much focused on Marshall's work. And these two problems that Serafa has in his mind have different natures, says the paper, actually, Kurs paper, Kurs and his co-author's paper, says that only the former, he insisted that this should be of the theory of value, while the later, the second question, is much more appropriately belong to an analysis of the business cycle.

41:21The first one suggests geometrical theory, and the second one is about mechanical theory, etc., etc. So, he asks some theoretical questions, and this paper shows how these theoretical questions are linked to methodological questions. And that's also one reason why I really like that paper, bring together theory and methods. Fantastic. Well, thank you, you two, for your, for the things that you've brought to the table today.

Conclusion

41:58These are really fun readings. I've enjoyed them very much. And to our audience members out there, we will be putting up links, though they may be paywalled, to these papers on our, on our website. So, that will be available to you to access with that one caveat. Apart from that, thank you. Thanks. Thanks. See you next time.

42:27Join us again next month for another episode of Smith & Mark's Walk Into a Bar, a History of Economics podcast.