relevant to what is happening today. However, I think a more important objection to his approach is that it reduces the potential to learn from history. I would suggest that one can learn more from the past through trying to uncover what it was that economists were trying to achieve better than through cataloging their technical ‘‘mistakes,’’ the last word being put in quotes because the economists might not have accepted that they were mistakes. Surely Adam Smith’s understanding of economic liberty as entwined with moral arguments about individual liberty (Rothschild 2001), or the ongoing nineteenth-century debates between political economy and its Romantic critics (Winch 2009), are of as much relevance to contemporary concerns as whether Smith made what, by the standards of modern theory, are technical mistakes. One might also think that discussion of why there has been a shift towards thinking of people as isolated individuals rather than as social creatures (as discussed by Rodgers 2011, a book I wish I had been able to read before I wrote mine) would be helpful in understanding modern economics. Such perspectives, involving historical rather than rational reconstruction of past ideas, may not give us a new simple model, but they might make people more aware of alternative ways of thinking about economic questions. If Schlefer is distressed by Blanchard’s reference to the trash bin of history, taking such literature seriously would, I think, be a more effective way to challenge that perspective, for his approach surely reinforces myths and fosters an attitude to history that is inimical to the openmindedness and skepticism about models for which he is arguing. Moreover, the broad coverage detracts from the much better book that I think he could and should have written—more tightly focused and probably significantly shorter—on macroeconomic modeling in the light of the financial crisis.
[1]
W. Barber.
Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914
,
2012
.
[2]
Daniel T. Rodgers.
Age of Fracture
,
2011
.
[3]
M. Farish.
Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Nils Gilman. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (2003), xi+329 pages, US$48.00 hardback
,
2005
.
[4]
Michael E. Latham.
Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era
,
2000
.
[5]
E. Rothschild.
Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
,
2001
.