HOPE Conference 2011 Call for Papers

HOPE Conference 2011 Call for Papers: "A history of observation in economics"
The annual HOPE Conference in 2011 will take place in late April or early May of that year, and the topic for the meeting will be the history of observation in economics.
Expressions of interest and initial ideas for papers that might be developed in discussion with either of the convenors, and/or written paper proposals of 300-500 words to which they will respond should be sent to h.b.j.b.maas@uva.nl and/or m.morgan@lse.ac.uk.
By tradition, this is a small "invitation only" conference, where a small number of papers from an open call are accepted and all discussion of papers is in plenary mode. These papers are then put through a normal refereeing process for consideration for publication in the Annual Supplement to the journal History of Political Economy (HOPE) for 2012. (In other words, acceptance of a paper at the conference does not guarantee publication in the supplement, only consideration for publication.)
The conference is a 2-3 day meeting, where conference funds usually cover participants' hotel costs and meals, but only rarely their travel costs.
Recovering the lost history of observation in economics:The aim of the 2011 HOPE Conference is to recover/uncover/investigate the now lost history of observation in economics. Observation is ubiquitous in economics, but has become completely eclipsed from its history. After the rise of statistical thinking in the nineteenth century, and the econometric revolution in the nineteen-thirties, economists, methodologists and historians of economics came to identify "observations" with the statistical data sets that were gathered by statistical bureaus all over the world. These data sets - pre-recorded by others - served as inputs for economists' models and the testing ground for theories, and so these measurements came to be considered as the "observations" that economists work with. This state of affairs fits well with the mid-twentieth-century emphasis in the philosophy of science on observational statements, rather than on the process of observing itself, just as it fits economists' emphasis on measurement, quantification and testing. But it makes the multifarious practices and techniques (political) economists have used and do use to observe the world vanish from view. It prevents an understanding of the (changes in) observational practices that can be witnessed not only in the past, but also at present. From an historical point of view the idea that the observations of political economists can be identified with statistical (quantified) data is far from obvious. Most famous perhaps are Adam Smith's observations of the working of the pin factory (probably taken from secondary sources such as the French Encyclopédie) that informed his analysis of the division of labour. Marshall made field notes of conversations with politicians, businessmen, and working men - the kind of observations made famous by Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street - and these notes were somehow translated into his diagrams and theories of long and short term markets and international trade. Ronald Coase's famous paper on transactions costs was amongst other things motivated by his experiences observing American industry. Because of the difficulties economists like Phyllis Deane and Wolfgang Stolper experienced in forcing statistical data from colonial and post-colonial Africa into the mould of Stone's system of national income accounts, they travelled there to observe and ask local inhabitants about their economic ways of doing. Contemporary discussions about the importance of "real time data" for economic modelling and policy, show the economist's awareness that there is a gap between the recording and what the recording intends to express. The renewed popularity of surveys and questionnaires to gather information, the still very recent rise of game theory and the laboratory as new tools and sites to investigate markets and to produce "evidence", the introduction of spectacular new visualising tools like the fMRI-scan to observe individuals, the collapse of certain econometric forecasting techniques in the face of the current financial crisis, all press us to re-investigate our received understanding of what observations are in economics, and how practices of observation changed through history.
Possible themes that might be addressed by papers for the conference include:
- Observation at the interface between economists, policy makers and the public.
- Skills, tools and techniques of the observer
- Sites for observing (political economy club, statistical office, laboratory)
- Trusting local observers versus imposing central standards
- Purposes of the observer and ways of observing
- 'Staging': intervening in order to observe, observing in order to intervene
- Travelling, recalling and recording
Conference organisers: Harro Maas & Mary Morgan.