Graduate Studies in the History of Economic Thought

If the current curriculum in graduate economics programs is any indicator, then the economics community finds the history of economic thought (hereafter HET) of limited or no relevance in the training of the next generation of professional economists. Almost no Ph.D. programs require HET as part of their core curriculum, and a relatively limited number of programs offer field courses (or even electives) in HET. The virtual absence of HET within the Ph.D. core and field curriculum should come as little surprise, as a downward trend in interest in doctoral-level HET courses was signaled by H. R. Bowen (1953) in his report on graduate education in economics and was reaffirmed more than ten years later in D. F. Gordon's (1965) study of the state of HET.

I leave it to the reader to decide whether the current level of Ph.D. education in HET is satisfactory. My hands-off approach to this normative claim reflects my own ambivalence. As a graduate student, I was drawn to HET as a partial balm for the (not uncommon) malaise of being a first-year Ph.D. student. HET also offered, at Duke, three collegial professors generous with their time and eager to discuss and foster any of my intellectual pursuits. But these don't present clear arguments for advocating that more departmental resources should be devoted to increasing the presence of HET within graduate programs. There is little demand for HET in the job market, and unless one is explicitly hired to do HET research, there is little consideration given to such research in tenure decisions (which is not the case for other fields).

While I'm uncertain if (and how vigorously) the status quo should be fought against, one could make the case for either (or both) of two strategies for increasing the prominence of HET in graduate programs: promote the teaching of HET within existing core courses (something that apparently is currently nonexistent), or advocate for more field and elective HET courses.¹ I think the former strategy has a greater potential for success for primarily two reasons. First, I agree with Derek Brown and Shauna Saunders (this volume) that the job market demonstrates little demand for HET field specialists, which makes graduate faculty reluctant to substitute away from other specialties in order to offer more HET courses and also makes graduate students disinclined to choose HET as a research interest. Second, there is some evidence of a desire within the economics community to improve the breadth of understanding of economics within the core graduate curriculum, which could make graduate faculty amenable to teaching historiographic tools within core courses. This desire was represented in the report of the state of graduate education commissioned by the American Economic Association (Krueger et al. 1991) and in the conversations that A. Klamer and D. Colander (1990) had with graduate economics students in the mid-1980s.

The main focus of this essay is to present the current state of HET within Ph.D. economics programs and to point out any indications of potential demand for HET training within graduate programs, particularly within the core curriculum. When I set out to collect information about the state of HET, I felt it was best to hear from those people most directly involved with Ph.D. economics programs. I sent two separate questionnaires: one to chairs of economics departments that offer graduate-level HET courses, and another to HET professors within these departments. What follows is a description of what I learned from a sample of department chairs and from another sample of HET professors.

The evidence suggests that there is currently little training of Ph.D. students in core or field HET courses, and there is little indication that more will occur anytime soon. Indeed, given the small number of junior HET faculty and the small number of recent placements of HET job...