What am I doing here?
Adelaide Baronchelli, Martina Dattilo, Alessandro Migliavacca, David Monciardini, Giuseppe Pernagallo, Paola Pisano (with Teresa Bettini, Eleonora Ferrari, Rossella Lombardo)
Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica “Cognetti de Martiis”
The annual ESHET conference is organized by the Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de Martiis”. “Historical” reasons justify the candidacy to host the meeting, but it is the attention this latter devotes to the recent evolution of the economics discipline that legitimizes ESt's ambition to play an important role in the construction of the conference. The main topic of the conference (“It's the end of economics (as we know it)”) is the changing face of economics, or the “end” of a traditional view of the discipline under the impact of three main forces:
· Specialization in research: an increasing fragmentation of the discipline promoted by the prevalence of a find-your-niche approach as a pragmatic solution for the otherwise unmanageable burden of previously accumulated knowledge.
· Data over theory: the ever-increasing prestige of empirical research and the “applied turn” in economics, favored by new techniques and (big) data, but also by economics’ policy orientation.
· Interdisciplinarity: other disciplines are having a transformative impact on the field of economics, as demonstrated by the variety of research programs in mainstream economics.
The organizing committee has proposed to ESt scholars a session (or several) entitled “What am I doing here,” to borrow the title of the book collecting Bruce Chatwin's stories and travel memories. The common thread of the session (three papers, in English) is the answer to the question “What am I doing here”:
- “What am I doing” at a conference on the history of economic thought hosted by an Economics Department;
- “What am I doing” in an Economics Department hosting a history-of-economic-thought conference.
In other words, besides papers explicitly dealing with the abovementioned transformations, and specifically how such changes impact the Department’s main fields, we welcome articles that do not belong to the history of economic thought and have not been intended for this conference but exhibit an (albeit implicit) intention to discuss, starting from the approaches and themes proposed in them, the directions that economics as a discipline finds itself traveling today. Papers are discussed by a history-of economic-though or economic methodologist discussant appointed by the Conference organizers.
Session organizers
Martina Dattilo and Mario Cedrini