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Not So Dismal a Science: Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

William J. Barber
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Extract

Academic economists tend to come in two varieties. One type identifies a substantive specialism at the outset of a career and continues to cultivate it. A second type is more likely to respond to the American Economic Association's twice-a-decade requests for information about sub-specialties by providing a number of differing answers over the course of a professional lifetime. I accept Adam Smith's arguments about the gains from specialization arising from a widened division of labor, but I am also conscious that Smith held that excessive specialization could contribute to boredom in the workplace. In any event, I am temperamentally a Type II economist who has greatly enjoyed working on diverse scholarly topics. I am also aware of a number of turning points that have conditioned my world with consequences that I could not have foreseen.

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Articles
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Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 177 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

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