Episode Ninety Two

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 by my fellow hosts, Jinla Akder and Francois Alisson. Hi, Jinla. How are you? Hi, Jen. Fine. I'm happy. This is a sunny day. And finally, the heat is here in Turkey because it was cold until now, actually.

0:37I'm very happy to see you all. How are you, you?

Summer Break

0:41I'm doing well. We have started our, I submitted my grades a couple of weeks ago. It is our summer break. So that implies that I'm very happy. And I think your break is coming soon too, yes? Yes, in three weeks. No, in two weeks, actually. But I will be in Italy for a SHED conference next week. So I already, I mean, it will leave only one week after my return from Italy. So it will be

1:12great for me. Well, that's fantastic. And Francois, how are you doing? I'm fine. There is also sun today in Lausanne. It's not that hot. So, and I will be happy at the end of this week to meet Jinla in Torino and also our guest of today.

Guest Introduction

1:32I'm so sad to not be joining you at EastShut. But in any case, I'm actually very excited to introduce today our guest for the show, who's a familiar face to many of us in the discipline of the history of economic thought, and actually has the office next to Francois in Lausanne. So I'm very, I'm very pleased to introduce to you Haro Maas, who is professor in the Walras Pareto Center for the History of Economic and Political Thought at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. And Francois, as, as it's your department colleague, I'm going to give you

Haro Maas Interview

2:06the first question and we'll kick things off. Excellent. So welcome, Haro, on the, on the show. I'm very happy to have you. You, you sent us a paper, let's calculate moral accounting in the Victorian period, which came out in history of political economy in 2016. There are several different layers to these papers. So first, who are the main characters discussed in this

2:39paper and what is moral accounting to start with? Yeah. Thank you for that question. I must

Moral Accounting

2:49confess, I've been thinking for a long time about what moral accounting means myself. I think I'm still not quite sure about what it means, but perhaps let me start with the cast of characters in this paper. And perhaps the first character really is accounting as a tool. The first I've been thinking for a very, very long time about the role of accounting in a human deliberation. I will tell

3:26probably more about this with, I think, some other questions that are posed as well. So perhaps here, I should just say that the first time I presented this paper was at a HOPE conference that led to this publication of Let's Calculate. And I remember that Anil Demarkey, who has been extremely supportive and extremely important for my own work. He was really puzzled about this paper and this interest in accounting.

4:05And he wrote a sort of encouraging letter or a review in which I had submitted the first version. And then he he tried to cut out as much accounting as possible because it was sort of difficult for him to see why accounting would be important. He could see that it had something to do with the Victorian period, but what this had to do with political economy was sort of opaque for him.

Accounting Practice

4:38And I tried to convince him that this notion of accounting and this practice of accounting was very important and also is very important for political economy and for the history of political economy. So in a sense, I think that I would say that accounting is the main protagonist of this paper. But of course, you tell a story, not just by talking about the tool, but you tell that via people.

5:14And perhaps this is also why you refer to different layers, because on the one hand, I hope it is clear that this paper is about a particular kind of practice that plays a particular kind of role. And that also turns into something that becomes embedded or important for how at least Stanley Jevons thinks about political economy and human deliberation. But then here I introduced one, a

5:46character that has been haunting me for a very long time. And I say haunting me because first I wrote about this person for my thesis work and then I didn't want to have anything to do with this person anymore. But that's just not how thesis work works. You're always drawn back into this person. And so that holds for me and for Stanley Jevons as well. So it has been a long, long journey for me to get back to

6:19Stanley Jevons and to rethink how Stanley Jevons, it's not how he came to his way of thinking about human deliberation, but how his way of thinking about human deliberation fits into a particular kind of culture. And this culture has everything to do with notes taking, which I refer to as accounting in a very, very broad sense. And I say a very broad sense, because if you read the paper, it's not so much about

6:57accounting as you would think in a business kind of sense. I take diary, diaristic note taking, like in agendas. I take that as accounting as well. And so it's a very broad notion of people taking notes, making notes about their lives, about their expenses, sort of reasoning on their lives, their expenses. And I take a couple of different persons for this to tell that story. And I refer to some,

7:33you might say, historical figures that are supportive for these persons. And the persons that I talk about are basically two, Stanley Jevons and George Eliot. I take them as a sort of protagonist of moral accounting, what I call moral accounting. And I will say something about that in a minute. And then I refer to some of the history of this practice, which you can also see as a diaristic practice. And that is

Diaries and Accounting

8:06Benjamin Franklin. I think I should mention that person first. And Alexander Bain. I think those two are, you might say, the historical, theoretical figures that are important for this notion of mental accounting. And then I also try to place this interest, my interest in, I think I just said mental accounting, but it should be moral accounting. So moral accounting. But there is something here with

8:39mental and moral accounting, which refers to, you might say, present day economist, someone I think historically is extremely important for economics, and that's Max Weber. And then if you think about Max Weber and accounting, then you're really very quickly, you go really very quickly into the Protestant ethics. And it's important for capitalism. But also, you quickly go to his discussion

9:11of psychophysics. And psychophysics was important for my thesis. Psychophysics is, I think, important for the emergence of neoclassical thinking. And it is important for present day behavioral economics. That, that at least is something that I would claim. And that I also see in the work of some of these behavioral economists, like Richard Thaler, to whom I refer in the introduction of the paper. And so perhaps

9:44Thaler is the best way to introduce what I mean with moral accounting. Because Thaler has a couple of papers about how individuals, consumers, the papers that I am thinking of, they were about consumer choice. And so how consumers get to their decisions. And he thinks about, or he talks about that as mental accounting. And then he quickly refers, refers to this mental accounting as, let's go back to basically the 19th century. Let's take this decision maker as a pleasure machine.

10:22This pleasure machine is following accounting rules. We don't know these accounting rules. So we have to have a sort of a theory to be able to say something about their accounting rules. And that's a prospector theory of Kahneman and Natversky. And so my naive question, in a sense, perhaps people used accounting methods. And perhaps we should look at those, their use of accounting methods, to get a sort of image or grip on how people actually made accounting decisions or made decisions. So why would we accept

11:03this idea, at least of Richard Thaler, that we don't have access to mental accounting rules, if we see that people use tools in which they use rules of accounting. These rules of accounting are not specifically accounting as in business accounting, but rules people use in what I call diaristic note-taking. And I think the importance here is that there are different dimensions in modalities, if you like,

11:37in the way that people are weighing their different spheres of life. You have a social sphere, you have an economic sphere, you have a private sphere, a genuinely private sphere perhaps, you have a family, you have perhaps professional obligations. Those are not all the same kind of thing. And you have considerations in many of these different spheres of life that, in a sense, you are thinking about,

12:07you are reasoning about, you make notes on them. And then, as I tried to show in this paper for George Eliot, and also for Stanley Jevons, you are weighing them, and then you get to a decision, if necessary. It's not necessary that you get to a decision, it can also just be a sort of record of your life. But what you can see in at least the 19th century in Victorian Britain is that people use this as sometimes, I

12:38think we also use this, at the end of the year, you're making up a sort of balance. What were the good things, what were the bad things, and what are the prospects for the coming year? And what does that mean for how I should behave? That's not just something about one sphere of life. It is more broad than just one sphere of life. And then I use the word moral here in an almost 19th century sense. Moral,

13:08as this is not just about one thing, it has to do with the personal and the social sphere, but there are different dimensions to it. So if you think about the moral sciences in the Victorian period, that was a broader notion than as we now perhaps would use moral, or moral sciences. I actually have, so I actually have a question about the title of your paper. So one thing, so I really

Paper Title

13:36enjoyed this paper. I got interested in your story right away, and part of the reason is because the title of the paper is a pun. The title of the paper refers to a let's in let's calculate, but it's L-E-T-T-S. Yes. Who is let's, or you know, who's let's? Like why is that person's name in the title? Yes. Yeah, thank you so much for that question. So I think the pun is lost on many people. And when I submitted the final version of the paper, Paul Dudenhoeffer, who as you know is the

14:11managing editor of Hope, whom I consider as a great friend, gave me the friendly advice not to use that title. And I insisted on that title, because I thought it was a very funny title. But I think that what is funny about it, people won't see. So the first thing about L-E-T-T-S is that this is the name of a company. It is the name of the company that is, it's a stationary company. There are other

14:44stationary companies, but L-E-T-T-S is a stationary company that was publishing a great variety of different agendas in the 19th century. Of course, most of people who use these kinds of diaries, agendas, we would now, I think, daily planners, we would call them now, they were just thrown away. Certainly, if you get a sort of the heritage of your parents, and there are all sorts of these agendas in the daily planners, they're not of interest, let's get rid of them. Which is a pity, because they are

15:20really a fantastic source of information, I think. But perhaps I'm the only person to think so. So it is a stationary company. And then let's calculate, if you pronounce it, it sounds like let us calculate, which is intended. Because if you think about accounting, then most people will associate that with something with numbers, and something with making a balance, and something

15:54with getting to decisions. And I sort of insisted, and perhaps wrongly on that title, because I also used it for another conference in the same year that I went to Duke to present the paper, which was a conference dedicated to Bruno Latour's interest in accounting. And so that was a sort of workshop in which there was a variety of different scholars who were presenting work on accounting.

16:27And then relating this to a late interest of Bruno Latour in this practice of accounting. And the workshop announcement, I think it was rightly announced as Bruno Latour was at last, finally, interested in accounting. So let's calculate. Calculemus. And now I'm looking a bit at you, Jennifer, because I don't know, you may know that Calculemus was, that's Latin, and it was used by Leibniz.

17:05If you, if you have a dispute, then Leibniz suggested, the way to end disputes is, let's calculate. So let's, let's, let's get the balance of arguments and calculate them and then see what the outcome is. Now, in a sense, you might say that, and now I'm going back to Benjamin Franklin. In a sense, you might say that Benjamin Franklin is doing exactly that. So Benjamin Franklin at a certain point is asked by

17:35Joseph Priestley, how should I make decisions in difficult matters? And then Benjamin Franklin writes back to him. Well, the way I do it is I take a piece of paper, blank paper, I fold it, and then I put on the one side pro, and on the other side, I put a con, contra. And then for a couple of days, I put down arguments pro and arguments contra that decision or that problem. For example,

18:08am I going to marry? Am I going to immigrate? Am I going to take this job in, in my case, in Lausanne, which is far away from Amsterdam? Am I going to do that? Am I going to all sorts of things, but difficult decisions. And so things that you really have to think about, you should not rush into a decision. But you, you have to really think about them. And so on the one hand, you get these arguments pro, on the other, you get the arguments contra, you add them for a couple of days. And then Benjamin

18:44Benjamin Franklin suggested, you put weights to the arguments. So I'm not going to give an example here that may be too, that may take too much time, but one for the one argument pro, two for one argument contra, and so forth. And then once you have given all these weights, then you wait for a moment. And then you take the, then you calculate. And then you see what side of the balance gets the

19:16most points. The winner will appear. And that's the decision that you take. So that's sort of what I try to allude to with this title, Let's Calculate. It's, it's a, it's a, it's an instrument. It's this, a stationary, this daily planner. It's something that is used by people to write all sorts of things down. It's something that they then use to make up their mind to get to decisions.

19:46Thank you very much for your answer. Just a personal remark before the question. Last semester, I gave a homework to the students of my two classes. This homework was to write an economist diary for three months. And in total, I read last semester, more than 100 diaries of the students of the Oh my God. And they wrote during three months, I will a little bit modified this homework and keep

20:21it for only one class. I will ask them to keep one month of diary. And I acknowledge your work after

Economist Diaries

20:30having that incredible experience. And if you could have time actually in Torino, I would like to talk a bit about this experience with you because some of the students were really calculating stuff in the diary. And as we are having inflationary period for last three, four years now in Turkey, they were all the time talking about the prices and the effect of these high prices, changing prices in their daily lives. And it was so,

21:02so interesting actually. So I'm so happy to acknowledge your work. I knew that Samuelson, I read somewhere that Samuelson wrote a diary and that was published,

Historical References

21:16but I didn't know much about other references that you used in your paper. So for the question I have, what were diaries like during the period you are thinking about in the paper? How do you connect the act of keeping a diary to an economist for professional work? And for you, where does this interest in diaries come from?

21:42Oh, yay. What a fantastic project. And what a challenge to read 100 diaries that they kept for three months. It's just unbelievable. So I'm really impressed. Before I try to say something to your question, I want to add to that. Francois knows that I taught for one semester in Venice. There is this international

22:15university and I taught there for one semester. And I wanted to do something with these diaries, with this mental or moral accounting. And I decided to frame a course around this. And then I wanted to talk about different modes, different ways in which people kept their diaries to come to decisions. And in a sense, you did, of course, something quite similar, I suppose,

22:47with your students, because my sense is that you did not prescribe them how to keep their diary or how to keep their notes. Now, I gave them only limited choices. And it's, I think, so this goes to in different directions. So I used a Chinese scheme of keeping notes on your moral accounts, which perhaps people here know, perhaps they don't. But it's the ledges of merit and demerit,

23:21which was important in the Ming period, and which I thought of as something that feeds into what is now this social credit system in China. And in a sense, I was confirmed in this by two students, two Chinese students who came from Beijing, who immediately, so I can't read Chinese characters, of course. And so I showed this image of a ledger of merit and demerit. And they said, yes, yes, yes,

23:56this is very important. And then they showed me how they are evaluated at their university. And they convinced me that there was some sort of similarity between this ledger of merit and demerit and these Chinese universities. In another sense, I was thinking about people using applications, apps in their daily use, to get a sort of grip on their doings. So I see what you did. I would see that in

24:28that kind of frame, and perhaps wrongly so. But for me, that would feed into

24:36an interest that I have in the quantified self, if I would put it in other words. So that's perhaps a starter. I think I can be short on keeping a diary and an economist professional work. The kind of diaries that I looked at, I think it would be, I think I can't say that they played a role in the economist work. I just think they did not. A daily planner did not play a

25:09work in the, did not play a role in the work of Stanley Jevons. It just didn't. That does not mean that his diary keeping, because he kept diaries in very different ways that did not play a role in his work. But those were notes of a different kind of character. So he made notes on the use of alcohol or other kind of stuff by people. And then he made all sorts of tables that he was calculating on.

25:40He was copying all sorts of meteorological information. That was something that he did as well. He was taking notes on the, I think you call that ephemerate. So on the stars, on the moon, and all those kinds of things. Thermometer readings. He was doing all those kinds of things, and he was taking note of that. In that sense, you can say that he was keeping diaries, but they are

26:13really different kinds of diaries than the diaries that I was looking on, looking at. The kind of diaries that I have been looking at, they were concerned with the daily doings of, of, of, of these people, like, like, like in the examples that I used in, let's calculate Stanley Devons and George Elliott. For George Elliott, for example, she writes down that her editor came, that the editor discussed a book

26:45chapter with her, or that the editor paid her a couple of pounds for, for books that he sold. Those kinds of things, or that her partner-in-law fell ill, or that his children, that they were ill, those kinds of things, or that she had a headache. She had a lot of headaches, actually. And I think that, well, I have all sorts of ideas about George Elliott that, that, that are not, not, not important here,

27:16but she was also writing down those kinds of notes about her life, about her social environment, and so forth. We go to the theater, we go to the opera, write it down. We had a dinner afterwards, and that's mixed with notes on, and we spent so much on, on, on, on our expenses on the omnibus, or we bought a new piano. Just to name very different things that you can find in those

27:51kinds of diaries. So I think that for their professional work, these kinds of diaries, I, I don't know of an example in which they were important, but I very much like the first part of your question, they took different forms. And that's certainly part of my interest, and also part of my story. And here, once again, Benjamin Franklin is important because Benjamin Franklin is just an

28:25example of a publisher of Almanacs in the 18th century. And there were many, many who published Almanacs and got filthy rich from publishing Almanacs. And in history, you might say the Almanac is rather tied to agriculture. So farmers, they use Almanacs to have an idea about time, basically, and about the seasons, about when is the plowing season, when are we going to harvest, and so forth. Those are,

29:04and then there is a lot of information, mostly in Almanacs, that is, again, about the ephemerides, it can be about all sorts of legal matters, it can be about rent tables, all sorts of information you can find in Almanacs. And these Almanacs sort of evolved. So there were people who wanted to take notes in their Almanacs. And for this purpose, you could ask a publisher to insert blank pages into an

29:39Almanac. And so they did. And so you see George Washington, who is using the Virginia Almanac. They're easy to find on the internet. And then you see that he is, he inserted blank pages in these Almanacs. And these blank pages are more known than the Almanac itself, because there he's taking notes on, he's going to his fields, he is checking on his slaves, he doesn't call them slaves in many cases. But he's checking on his slaves, he's making notes on his farm, on how well the farm is going.

30:18He's also taking notes on if someone dies. He's taking notes on that. So there's this sort of personal information, business information mixed together that you find in George Washington notes. And I like this book a lot. It's a history of the daily planner. I recommend it to everyone, Molly McCartney, who wrote a history of the daily planner. And she shows how these Almanacs, how they

30:49evolved in different kinds of specialized books, where you have on the one hand, something like what we now call a daily planner. On the other hand, you have more business like accounting books, that becomes reserved for financial information. And then there are so well, let me let me stick to those two. And then they cater to different kinds of audiences. I've got one more question about this particular paper, let's calculate. There's also there are also references to

31:23developments in psychology in the paper, you said psychophysics earlier, and in a response to an earlier question. So tying the history of psychological, like, you know, what's going on in psychology to what's going on in this in this paper about about moral accounting, how, how are those scientific developments, psychological developments relevant to the thesis you're trying to establish in the paper?

31:45Yeah, yeah, that's a difficult question. It's a question that is asked to me often. If I talk about this topic, it's also a question that I'm still in the process of finding out a decent answer. I haven't found a decent answer. So I'm not going to give a decent answer. I can only give, I think, a couple of pointers of why I think that this topic in particular, why that bears on

32:19present day psychology, and why it bears on behavioral economics, and why I think it is important to think about what is going on nowadays in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology in a historical fashion. My short answer, I think, and that will be very insufficient for many people who know much more about behavioral economics than I do. So I take behavioral economics and cognitive psychology here,

32:54basically under one umbrella, and I think with quite some reason. Because for many cognitive psychologies, the label of behavioral economics is a better label to sell themselves and to get a higher salary. That's perhaps not what they are happy with either. But that's me. Fine. So I think that, so if we start with the idea of the rational, the rational economic agent, I think that that

33:27we can all agree that this is just not a very credible idea. For many years after the Second World War, it was considered a credible idea. For someone like Lionel Robbins, it was common sense that this was just a very good idea, that we didn't have to do much laboratory research simply because common sense learns this is the way that people think. I know still a lot of colleagues also who

33:57think this is just the way that we think, rational economic agent. And then if we violate something like transitivity, then we make a mistake. And then, of course, you get a behavioral economist, cognitive psychologist, who showed that this is a systematic error, something like that. I'm not against that kind of research at all. I think it's really very important. What I am sort of hesitating about, and they may correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that a lot of

34:33research in cognitive psychology and in behavioral economics is of the order that I now try to refer to, refer to, namely that it is sort of hardwired in our brain, that we are thus constituted, that we make either this kind of mistakes, or that we behave the way that we do. Because if we investigate

35:04neuro logically, or at the end of the day, neurologically, we will find a specific kind of makeup of how the brain is made. And that is the partially, I interject the word partially, partially responsible for how we get to decisions. And then they add, of course, something to it. It makes a difference how we structure our

35:36environment. So if we structure our environment differently, and you can think about this famous example of the cafeteria, then we will get to different decisions. We are still hardwired as we are, but we frame things differently. And so we get to different decisions. We are still, by nature, the same

36:00person, but the decision will turn out differently. And I think this is just not helpful. I think it is. And that's also why I have sort of sympathy for someone like Gerd Gigerentzer, even though I think that Gerd Gigerentzer, in some of his work, gets into the same groove, and gets into a similar kind of thinking that at the end of the day, we are by nature constructed, that we are, for example, not able to take in all information. And actually, Gigerentzer, to stick now to Gigerentzer, takes this

36:37example of Benjamin Franklin, and moral algebra, to show that we are not able to take all these considerations into consideration, because we are just limited, rationally limited. And so we can't do that. And there, once again, I think he is sort of forgetting that Benjamin Franklin was not talking about our psychological makeup. He was talking about this specific kind of instrument, this algebra,

37:12of moral algebra, that people, that he suggested people to use to not make limited decisions. And so what I would like to emphasize is that you always have to look at the environment and the person or the individual at the same time. And if I say that, I'm pretty sure that all behavioral economists will say, that's exactly what we say. But what I would like to add as a historian is, and that makes that it

37:47is difficult to make any claims about, here we have this natural entity that has this specific psychological, neurological makeup, neurological makeup, and that we can decide on now and for eternity, how that looks like, and then we put it, and then we put it in an environment. We always have to consider this in an environment, and that environment is historically evolving. And if you don't think about this goal

38:18between historically evolving and this person, then you're missing out on something. So that is my take on why I think that history is important.

Keynes-Tinbergen Debate

38:30Perfect. Thank you very much. And now I would like to keep going with asking a question on another paper that you have sent it to us. The title of the paper is the mazes of logic versus the mazes of arithmetic. Keynes' ontological commitment to the fact and event of history. So in 1939, Keynes offered a famous criticism of John Tinbergen's statistical analysis of the business cycle. How is this criticism typically

39:06characterized and who else was involved into the debate? Thanks for that question. This is a question that I'm sort of going to, I'm going to try to find a roundabout method, a roundabout way to answer that question. On the one hand, there are so many people involved in the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, and there are people who are much better placed to say something

39:40about that than I am, that I'm almost hesitant to say something about it. But I think that the context of this debate is important, this debate is important. As you mentioned, it is 1939. We are on the brink of the Second World War. And Keynes is not someone who is unaware of historical circumstances. If you think about this line in this criticism, which is not referring to Tinbergen, but to the League of Nations or to the

40:16Research Department of the League of Nations, that the League of Nations thinks that at this juncture of time, 1939, it's the most important thing to think about statistical juggling with business cycles, that they have nothing better to think about. That is something that he just thinks is unbelievable. And I can feel a bit with Keynes. So let me put that also straight on the table. I'm very much

40:52on Keynes' side in this debate. Not so much because of the arguments that he gives, but because of the sort of cowardice of the League of Nations to talk about business cycle studies when they actually should talk about how can we avoid a Second World War. And one of the issues that was on the table, and I don't have this of my own research, but one of the other issues that was on the table was agriculture. And

41:25agriculture apparently was so tensioned to talk about in the theories also because, or for if there was one reason that agriculture was difficult to talk about, it was because much of fascist movements in Europe at the time were linked to agricultural movements. And so agriculture was sort of out of the question that we would address agriculture as an issue. And as a sort of second best,

42:01and people who know more about this, they will certainly correct me. So this is a sort of layman's version of what went on in the League of Nations in those days. And I think that people like Max Ehrenfreude and Laetitia Lenel, they're a much better place to say something about this than I am. But let me just try to go on and finish what I think I know about this situation. So the League

42:33of Nations or the Research Department settled on the second best, which every economist wanted to talk about business cycle studies. And of course, given the Great Depression, that was not something that was a very weird thing to talk about either. So there's nothing against a discussion of business cycles, but it was not on the top of Keynes' agenda, if I can put it that way. So that is perhaps one thing that

43:05I could say about who was involved. And then I mentioned all economists were happy to talk about it. And then all economists who talked about, discussed, wrote about business cycles, they were involved in this. And there are so many, I'm not going to mention them. And then for those who know, there were two studies. One was by these economists. And then the other was by Jan Tinbergen, and not just Jan Tinbergen, of course, it was sort of a collective endeavor there as well. But Jan Tinbergen, he was

43:42responsible for the report that was written. So Tinbergen, he was not chosen because he was a great economist. He was chosen because he was a minor economist, and he was a great statistician. That's how he was looked at. Now, at the time, it was a very young person still. I don't remember his exact age, but he was a young economist, either at the end of his 20s or the beginning of his 30s. Not someone with the kind of prestige that he, of course, would have when he got the Nobel Prize. And the reason

44:18that they choose Tinbergen was he would do no harm, feeding into this sort of neutralization idea that I just talked about. Everything was difficult. Let's not make any enemies. Let's get someone who is an able statistician, but who won't make any trouble. And there, they had miscalculated the kind of person that Tinbergen was. Because Tinbergen is a very outspoken person. He was a

44:50teetotaler. He did not follow Dutch orthographic rules because he thought those were elitist. And so you write a language as you speak it. He was a socialist. He was a pacifist. So there were all sorts of, I think, things about Tinbergen that people had not noticed, but that were very important for the kind of mindset of someone like Tinbergen. And then Tinbergen did what he is good at, and that

45:22is using mathematics and statistics to think about economic questions. And so that's this report that then got published. And Keynes was just outraged. For Keynes, this was not economics. And it was not the economics that was needed at this moment of time. And then I tried to show in this paper, the mazes of logic and the mazes of arithmetic. So on the one hand, we have logic. And on the one other hand,

45:54the other hand, we have arithmetic. And in this paper, I identify arithmetic with statistics. That may be wrong, but I do so. And Tinbergen, Keynes identifies Tinbergen with this arithmetic, statistical, theoryless tradition. And now I emphasize theory. But actually, I think that theory is not quite what I would emphasize if I talk about logic. Because the way that I use logic in this paper is not about

46:31theoretical ideas. But it is about how can we conceive, how can we understand what is happening in the economy at large. And theoretical notions may be important there. But history, historical events are important there. It is not something that is primarily something that we can approach by looking at statistical data. First, we have to have a sort of general idea of what's going on. And then perhaps

47:07we can use statistics to say something more in specific, and perhaps even quantify what this generic picture of an economy looks like. And for that I use, you might say, his upbringing in Cambridge, with Alfred Marshall, and the notion of historical events, that I try to highlight what are historical

47:38events, the war in Gaza, the election of Trump, the Crimean War, the war in Ukraine nowadays, Trump, who is announcing tariffs. That's not statistics. Those are historical events. And then, of course, you can perhaps see or not see something in statistical data. But it is the

48:09events that come first, and the data that are second. And that is the maze of logic versus the maze of arithmetic. So regarding these historical events, you mentioned a Cambridge connection, but it even goes further, early in time, because it is a paper about Keynes ontological commitment. But yet again, there is William Stanley Jevons in the picture. Yes, I'm so sorry about this.

48:46And so I would like you to elaborate a bit about this affiliation of ideas on historical events,

48:54from William Stanley Jevons to John Maynard Keynes through Alfred Marshall. Can you do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to twist that perhaps a bit, because you smuggle in ideas. And I'm not quite sure. It depends a bit what you mean with ideas. So if this is, and I think this feeds into ontological commitments. If you mean with ideas, ontological commitments about how the world

49:29looks like it looks like, then I'm happy to talk about ideas. If you mean ideas, as referring to the ideas of economists as the ideas in theories, the relation between investment and the rate of interest, or the liquidity trap, or whatever ideas economists may have, then I'm not your man. Because that is not what I am talking about. And it's not something that I want to talk about,

50:02in relation to the three economists that you mentioned. But these ontological commitments, the ideas that they, these three economists have about how the world looks like, I'm happy to talk about that. And in a sense, I'm sort of cheating. Because I, I'm cheating. I think I'm, I'm cheating in two ways. The one is that I have been teaching this Keynes-Tunbergen debate for years. And I wanted to write

50:37something about this Keynes-Tunbergen debate. And I did not quite know how to approach that debate.

50:48Then I had, I think the luck. So it's a sort of, this is a paper that emerged out of luck and a personal necessity. The luck was that I was asked, years ago, to reflect on the work of Tiziano Raffaelli. And some people may know Tiziano Raffaelli as one of the great and perhaps the greatest marshal scholar, our small fields has known. He passed away too early. And I felt extremely

51:27honored that I was asked to give the Tiziano Raffaelli lecture to Storrep. And I then felt obliged to do something that I had tried not to do for my professional life. I felt that I had to write about Alfred Marshall. And so I took up some archival materials that I have been looking at for years. And the, the kind that, that led to a sequence of papers on Alfred Marshall,

52:01in which I tried to show that Alfred Marshall himself was sort of unhappy with the principles of economics that he published in 19, 18, 19. And of course, the principles of economics is his major work in terms of influence on the economic discipline. But I tried to follow some of Alfred Marshall's own hesitations about this and how these hesitations can be seen in his

52:37conversations with his pupils, his scholar, his students. And then this led me to sort of taking Keynes and the Keynes-Thunbergen debate into consideration as well. And I thought that, well, actually what I see in Keynes criticism of Thunbergen, I can see that in Marshall's hesitations with the rapidly emerging mathematical statistics, as Marshall refers to it in his days as well. And

53:16this mathematical statistics is what we now refer to as regression analysis, regression analysis, correlation analysis, which Keynes, of course, saw in Thunbergen's work as well.

53:32So what were Marshall's hesitations? I think this has to do with the facts and events of history, as I refer to it in the subtitle of this paper on Keynes and the Keynes-Thunbergen debate, or in the papers that I wrote about Marshall as Marshall's struggle with the world of the strange facts, the strange facts, I think, that that Marshall at some point refers to it.

54:04And then first I thought this is about statistics. But then if you look at the way that Marshall is collecting all sorts of materials. So Marshall wrote this book, Principles of Economics. And in the meanwhile, he was sort of gathering data and he was putting them in this book that every student of Marshall knew because Marshall used it in his teaching and he referred to it in his teaching,

54:38this red book. And we see all sorts of diagrams in it. But then he is using these diagrams not quite as we would use them nowadays, and not quite as his immediate predecessor, almost contemporary Stanley Jevons, how Stanley Jevons used these diagrams either. And so there is a sort of split or a sort of divergence. And what Marshall is doing is strange for someone who is thinking in mathematical terms.

55:09So if you look at references of Marshall or letters that Marshall wrote to Jevons in which he says, I want to contribute to your, and he refers to this as realising economics. Jevons, you realised economics, you made it more empirical, you made it more concrete. It's not something that is just theoretical, but it is concrete. But then if you look at how Marshall is

55:40trying to make this concrete, it's not at all what Jevons is doing. So Jevons is taking these data sets, he's making diagrams of them, and then he's looking at the movements in these diagrams. He's taking seasonal, he's making trend analysis, he's taking moving averages, all sorts of, you might say statistical techniques, to bring out a sort of more generic movement in these statistical data.

56:12And then Jevons starts theorising on the statistical data, what kind of mechanism is buried in these statistical data. That is typically, you might say, the mindset of someone who is searching for mechanisms in statistics, who is thinking that not just a physical event, not just chemical events, but also social events, they are driven by a sort of mechanism. And Marshall is steering away from that. He's not using those kinds of techniques at all.

56:46He is adding historical events to turning points on diagrams. He is starting to add short sequences of historical events to reason about what happens in these diagrams. For example, there is the Crimean War. There were new railways in Europe. There are misharvests, or there are very good harvests,

57:20perhaps, or misharvests in Ukraine. But the grain cannot come to Europe because there is this war. That's a different kind of causal analysis than if you are looking at these diagrams, and you try to sort out in these diagrams what kind of mechanism is buried in it. And you take, you might say, the Crimean War as a shock, as we would now perhaps think about it. It's not a shock. Marshall is more and more going in the direction of linking these events to one another to get to

58:01a causal story and to get to Keynes. That's, I think, what Keynes is sort of preferring as well. And so if you take these three economists, then Jevons is much more modern than Marshall or Keynes. And I think this is also perhaps why some of Keynes' writing is strange to us, or strange to many economists. Because they read prose, and Keynes is using sometimes mathematics, but then it's just

58:36identities that he's putting into place. He sometimes talks, perhaps, about something like the consumer as a parameter, but he's not really making a function of it. So why is he not doing that? Well, it's not something stable. There's not something stable there at all. Why would you do that? He's hesitating. He's hesitating about the direction that economics is taking. And that

59:09doesn't mean that Keynes is not interested in numbers or in statistics. But national accounting, it's much more something that he's interested in than econometrics. Finally, we read another paper of yours, A Moral Compass in a Sea of Change, Household Accounts

Moral Compass Paper

59:28and the Ideal of True Womanhood in the Progressive Era, which you co-authored with Gabrielle Sue Dunn. Could you tell us a little bit about this paper? What's this ideal of true womanhood? And kind of to spoil things a bit, how does it relate to modern behavioral economics? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you a lot for that question as well. I didn't have sufficient time to get to a genuine rewrite already, but quite a few things already changed.

59:59But I can imagine that you felt puzzled by this paper, even though I hope that this paper, that it's obvious that there is a connection between this paper and the first paper that we discussed, this Let's Calculate. And so perhaps I should also say that this paper, and so the thesis of Gabrielle Sudan is part of, was part of a project that Gabrielle and another student, Vigil Vibout, Le Palac,

1:00:36who happens to be linked to a very important socialist here in the Netherlands, whom Jan Tinbergen wrote to for, to ask if he could be of help for the socialist movement. That is, Floor Vibout, but that's really a side, side step. So we, the three of us, we worked on this project, Moral Accounting, the history of moral accounting. And it's three different episodes of which we have as the most

1:01:09accomplished Gabrielle Sudan's thesis. And so Gabrielle looked at the home economics movement. That's one. She looked at the children's books, like the house, the little prairie house, or the

1:01:31Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She looked at a range of other children's books, some of the end of the 19th century, some around the same time as Laura Ingalls Wilder. And then we talk about the 1930s, the kind of morality that was presented to young children, and especially to young girls, to girls. What kind of morality was taught to these children? And more in particular, what kind of

1:02:05morality in relation to, you might say, money and how market phenomena were taught to these children? The household, the household, the home economics movement, I already mentioned that, and I will say a bit more on that in a minute. And then she also selected a couple of diaries,

1:02:28household accounts diaries, but also the kind of diaries that go more in the direction of earlier almanacs or the daily planners that we started talking about. Something like 15 women, more or less around the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. So if you would think about that as the progressive era in the United States, that basically is where she took these household accounts

1:03:05from. For this paper, we decided not to talk about all of these practical books. So these 15 women, but to take out two that we think are quite different. And so I'm sort of hesitant to say that they are representative of anything, but they do represent two different, what we refer to in the paper as moral economies, two very different economies that these women function in.

1:03:44And then we try to place these two, the different moral economies and what we can learn from their

1:03:56account taking, what you can learn from the, out of these account taking, from these moral economies, we try to put that in the context of the United States in that period and to sort of show how a geographical difference between a country woman and an urban elite woman like Helen Headley, how they almost also represent a sort of time shift. And that's, that's not something that I think quite works as we have

1:04:35written the paper now, but the geographical distance between, I have to, I always forget her, Gertrude, Gertrude Thelman, who lives in a, still a very rural era, rural area that is linked, nevertheless linked to, to urban developments because of the railway system that is already in, in place where she lives. But the kind of

1:05:08things that she is doing are still very much part of an almost autarchic farm life. And that's what she is taking notes of, her own doings at the farm, the doings of her mother, of her sister, of her husband, the social context that she is living in. So she's going to church, she is making dinner for all of the family. They visit a family in some of the villages or towns that surround the place where they are

1:05:44living. And that is Hannibal. That's upstate New York, close to Lake Ontario, if I'm correct. So she's writing about that. She's writing about purchases that she's making. She's writing about purchases that are made at the farm, about money that's coming in, money that's going out, about people who are indebted to the farm, where they are indebted to. And so you have this very complex, you might say,

1:06:18this complex note taking that is sort of different from what we've seen for someone like Jevons and George Eliot, who took notes on their own lives, which perhaps also was perceived at a certain moment as a business life. But here it is a business, but it's also something that is registering the life of this Gertrude Salman herself. But the way that she's taking her notes are very much in the

1:06:52way of George Washington. It's very fact-like. There are no emotions or hardly any emotions that play a role there. So it's sort of getting a grip on at least part of farm life, as in 18th century almanacs, people who take notes on their lives in that period. George Washington, Ph.D.: We think about that as a moral economy because of these different

1:07:24dimensions, once again, these different modalities that play a role in this note taking. It's not all in terms of money. It's not a completely marketized or money economy that they live in. There are different considerations that are important. And why this is important, and that may be wrong if I say so, but she at least is taking note of these different modalities of farm life. And from that,

1:07:55I infer it's important to note it. She's going to church. She's visiting the family of her husband. Her husband is visiting his mother. People fall ill. They pay attention to it. Those kinds of issues, we think as part of a moral economy. So that's one part. And so it is moral accounting that we talk about here because it is wider than just about numbers. Now, if you go to Helen Hadley, it's almost

1:08:30the only numbers that you see there. And the account book that she is using is she is adjusting

1:08:41a commercial account book, a cash book, to her own needs. And then the account books that we have access to. They are monthly totals, yearly totals. And you see that Helen Hadley is making all sorts of calculations on these monthly and yearly numbers. She is producing a number on the cost of food per person daily for different years, for different configurations of

1:09:19the family. How many family members are there? Seven, 10, makes all a difference. She's making all sorts of notes on reservations of money that she is making for her children on all sorts of holiday spendings that she is doing with her husband. But we also see that she's spending on tea sessions where apparently a lot of people show up. Sometimes there is a sort of ceremony for some 200 or even 300 or even more people. And why

1:09:58do they have these ceremonies? Well, her husband is the president of Yale, Arthur Hadley. Some people who know about the progressive era may know Arthur Hadley as a railway economist. I think most people won't know Arthur Hadley as an economist at all and won't know. And so forth. But then it is also clear from, or at least we think it is clear from the notes that Helen Hadley is taking, that she is in the service of

1:10:35a business. And I think I'm pushing this point a bit stronger than Gabrielle Sudan. But Helen Hadley,

1:10:48on the top of the pages of where she is taking, where she is inserting these numbers of expenses, she writes Hadley and company. And so it is not a family, it is a company. She is part of a company that is serving a particular kind of business. And the business is the business of her husband, who is first a professor at Yale in economics, and then he becomes the president of Yale. But throughout, almost throughout his

1:11:23professional life, she is not just taking notes for the good of the family, but also to register how good her family is directed in the service of this business, which is the business of Arthur Hadley. So the social events that she is responsible for, it's clear there's a division of responsibility from reading

1:11:57these accounts. Arthur Hadley is responsible for the investments, long-term investments. She for the daily business of the family business of the house, that the expenses that she is making are for the good of this, that she's doing well for this family business. So it's not just notes taking just to balance the

1:12:28accounts, but it's also to get a sort of grip on, again, these different modalities of life. But the modalities for an urban woman like Helen Hadley are very different than for someone like Gertrude Thalman. So we tried to make a comparison between both, and we tried to do so in terms of this true womanhood, which was a sort of ideal of what a woman should be already before the

1:13:03civil war in the United States. And we tried to show that the sort of substance of this true womanhood, that it changes because the economic circumstances change. But there is still this sort of desire to be

1:13:21frugal, thrifty, industrious, and Christian, if you like. Certainly for Gertrude, this is very clear, this is, I think, less clear for Helen Hadley. And I think this is one of the things that changes over time, one of the important changes over time, which brings me to the home economics movement. Because with the change from a rural society to an urban society, and I think this is the change that

1:13:55we actually talk about, not so much about consumption, even though this is in the title, but it is from the shift from a rural society to an urban society, the demands on women change substantially. Now, consumption, of course, becomes an important part of this, like market consumption, like going to runnemakers, Sears, all these department stores. So you get a sort of shift also of what happens in the

1:14:27house, what happens on the market. Many products that before were made at home, they are now ready-made and bought in the market. So that changes the role of what thrifty means for a woman. The sort of tasks for a woman, they change. They are no longer related to, for example, the selling of eggs, which in earlier days, if you are on a farm, that was part of what you were responsible for.

1:15:01And that was something that you got money for, but you don't have this sort of moneyed income anymore as a woman. And so there is a sort of rebalancing, and that's nothing new. If we say that, a rebalancing of what production means, what consumption means, and the whole homely sphere becomes sort of void, evacuated of the notion of production. That becomes something that is only in the, you might say, public or the market sphere. And then the home is void of production.

1:15:38And in a sense, we try to show that that is not just the case. And in fact, that was also something that for the home economics movement was very important. But there is this progressive aspect of the home economics movement. And you might say this very conservative aspect. So what the home economics movement tries to accomplish, and we talk a bit about this, but this is something that has to be, be, I think, put in a separate section, because it's not in a separate section now. And I think

1:16:13it helps the reader, if this is sorted out in a separate section, it is sort of this scientifization of the home, which the home economics movement is doing, and striving at. So because the home becomes such a different kind of place, as it was as a farm, women have to be re-educated in what the home means. And this re-education also entails that women have to be taught about new scientific insights into sanitary

1:16:56science, into food science, into product science, all kinds of things that become part of what home economic programs at land grant colleges become, and what home economic studies at institutes like federal home institutes or state home institutes, what they start studying. And later on, you might say, in the 30s, with people like Hazel Kirk, and others, this becomes labeled in terms of consumption.

1:17:33And so there is this sort of shift from studying of the home, to studying of consumption, to studying, and here I'm referring to the work of another PhD student of mine, who has much more knowledge about this and who is writing really wonderful stuff about this, David Philippi, who is much more savvy on this sort of shift from the home economics movement to the study of consumption

1:18:06in the 30s. So we are touching on that, but I think, well, I think you will agree that as the paper stands at this moment, there are all these sorts of different snippets, but it's not quite clear. And it has to be sort of sorted out in these different sections. Well, perhaps you disagree, perhaps you think it's very nice. And I hope, of course, you think so. But I don't think you think so.

1:18:40So in your research, you often use a variety of material that enriches your analysis. These images, sketches of notes, calculations, tables are mostly handwritten or primarily produced by economists. How do you find these documents? When and how did you adopt this unique method?

1:19:01Yeah, thank you for that question. I don't think it's unique at all. I think there is a lot of us historians who delve into archives and find things. Perhaps the fact that I include a lot of that material in the written papers is a difference. I'm not quite sure there either. But for me, the relation between image and text is extremely important. And so it's for me difficult to write a

1:19:36text without having an image to it. So that I can sort of point to it and ask the reader or entice the reader to look at the image and see what I try to bring out of that image. And in many cases, when I submit a paper, the kind of commentaries that I get are about the images that I include and help me,

1:20:07in fact, in looking better at the image. Because the sort of questions make clear to me make clear to me that I didn't look well enough. And I think that is why I still or why I push these images and also why I think that if you don't put them in, you are missing part of the depth of an argument that you can make. So that would be my first answer. And then it's also, I think, that I'm not very good at telling

1:20:50general stories, generic stories. And that's, I think, also why I am an historian. At root, I am an historian, and I'm interested in the specifics. I think the generic or general stories are, they don't appeal to me. I think there is a lot to say against them. I really like that style because each paper is a storytelling also. And that became much more

1:21:20closer to the reader when we see an image related to the story, to the argument that you present in the paper. I really liked it, actually. I appreciate that you say so. But I think there are a lot of people who are out there who read my paper and will conclude, that's all very well. It's a very nice story. Congratulations. But it doesn't tell me anything that I didn't know already. Or it tells me something that I will forget the moment

1:21:53I close the paper. And let's get on with something that has more traction. And it could be just, it could be common in history, but it's not common in history of economic tot. I read many, many papers on history of economic tot. Even people who work in the archives don't always put images in their papers. It's not common. I don't think so. So it's really nice, actually, to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

1:22:23I know a lot of historians of science. That's perhaps also why I think that I should define as a historian of science first and then as a historian of economics second, who appreciate this delving into materials.

1:22:42With that, Haro, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your work with us. And I hope, and we all here hope, that you keep using lots of images in your, in your manuscripts and that you continue doing so. But in any case, thank you so much. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I very much appreciated your question and the conversation. Thank you.

1:23:09Join us again next month for another episode of Smith and Mark's Walk into a Bar, a History of Economics Podcast. Thank you. Thank you.