2017 Hes Presidential Address: Economists and Their Travels, or the Time When JFK Sent Douglass North on a Mission to Brazil

Abstract

The role of traveling as a source of discovery and development of new ideas has been controversial in the history of economics. Despite their protective attitude toward established theory, economists have traveled widely and gained new insights or asked new questions as a result of their exposure to “other” economic systems, ideas, and forms of behavior. That is particularly the case when they travel to new places while their frameworks are in their initial stages or undergoing changes. This essay examines economists’ traveling as a potential source of new hypotheses, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a detailed case study of Douglass North’s 1961 travel to Brazil.

Reports from China: Joan Robinson as Observer and Travel Writer, 1953–78

“…Drawing on the literatures on observation in science and economics (Maas 2011;Morgan 2011;Serra 2018) and economists' travels (Boianovsky 2013(Boianovsky , 2018Serra forthcoming), we aim at overcoming the dichotomy between Robinson as a 'political pilgrim' and as 'development economist'. Instead, we take a closer look at her observation practices, her literary choices, and her position within different political and intellectual communities.…”

An Emigrant Economist in the Tropics: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen on Brazilian Inflation and Development

“…The relevance of travelling as a source of inspiration for economists has been recently the subject of an insightful essay by Mauro Boianovsky (2018). Even though prominent scholars such as George Stigler (1967) and Herbert Simon (1996) have explicitly downplayed the importance of travelling in providing inputs for the development of economic knowledge, Boianovsky has shown how the travels of economists have systematically given rise, throughout history, to new ideas and insights.…”

Introduction: Roads to Economic Knowledge: The Epistemic Virtues of Travel across the History of Thought

“…No his to rian of sci ence will now a days ques tion the impor tance of reli able facts to travel to claim reli able knowl edge. 4 In con trast with his to ri ans and soci ol o gists of sci ence, econ o mists and their his to ri ans have proved quite resil ient to adju di cate the impor tance of travel for the knowl edge they claim (Boianovsky 2018). This goes back at least to the days of James Mill and Richard Whately in the nineteenth cen tury.…”

“…These exam ples show the close cor re spon dence that exists between an eval u a tion of the value and use of travel for econ o mists with ques tions about the sub ject's meth od ol ogy, and the ten sioned rela tions between ide ology, the ory, and facts. It was per haps to evade such ten sions that Herbert Simon and George Stigler ech oed Whately's claims when they argued that an econ o mist did not need to travel because he or she could more eas ily, and bet ter, acquire knowl edge of places far away by vis it ing the pub lic library around the cor ner (Boianovsky 2018).…”