Noise and Signal in the Latest History of Australasian Economic Thought

Anthony M. Endres

History of Economics Review, 2018, vol. 69, issue 1, 6-21

Abstract: A History of Australasian Economic Thought offers fine examples of effective, entertaining use of archives. Rather than a history of economic thought, this book mostly offers a ‘panoramic’ social history of economics, economists and their policy preferences from the 1920s–1990s. The storytelling method produces more noise than signal in the sense that the development and clash of various intellectual traditions in Australasian economics over time gets lost in the personal and institutional details. Key terms are either ill-defined or used loosely: economics profession, innovation, originality, theoretical and theoretician, economic dogma, monetarist, neoliberal economics, neoclassical economics. There is also much obfuscation concerning the influence of Keynes’s ideas (as distinct from Keynesian economics) in Australasia. Treatment of the last quarter of the 20th century inexplicably eschews readily available archives. Later chapters serve as platforms for a not so subtle critique of ideas purportedly responsible for market-oriented economic policy reforms in Australasia.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/10370196.2018.1488510

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