Abstract
On May 28 and 29, 2010, 11 experimental economists gathered at the premises of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) to participate in a so-called witness seminar on the history of the experiment in economics. The seminar was organized by Harro Maas and Andrej Svorenčík, principal investigator and Ph.D. student on a grant project that was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) on the history of observational practices in economics.
Economists cannot make use of controlled experiments to settle their differences; they have to appeal to historical evidence, and evidence can always be read both ways.
“What Are the Questions?” (Joan Robinson, 1977)
An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20952-4_10
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Notes
- 1.
The witness seminar was made possible by generous funding of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), VIDI-research grant 276-53-004. Briefly, the grant project consisted of three subprojects that took sites of observing as its starting point: the observatory, the laboratory, and the armchair. On the observatory and the armchair as sites of observing, see D’Onofrio 2013 and forthcoming; on the armchair see Maas 2011. See also Maas and Morgan 2012.
- 2.
See Tansey’s work for useful accounts of the method of the witness seminar. E. M. Tansey initiated and organized (and still does so) the witness seminars at the Wellcome History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group. Tansey, E. M. 2008. “The Witness Seminar Technique in Modern Medical History,” H. Cook, A. Hardy and S. Bhattacharya, History of the Social Determinants of Health. Orient BlackSwan, 279–95, Tansey, E. M. 2006. “Witnessing the Witnesses: Pitfalls and Potentials of the Witness Seminar in Twentieth Century Medicine,” R. E. Doel and T. Söderqvist, The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine: Writing Recent Science. London; New York: Routledge.
- 3.
To document the history of IT in Sweden, the science museum in Stockholm had organized two witness seminars that they combined with extensive face-to-face interviews of people involved in that history.
- 4.
For a complete list of witness seminars organized by the Institute for Contemporary British History at King’s College, see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/icbh/witness/WitSemscomplete.aspx [Accessed March 31, 2015]. The Winter of Discontent was a very cold winter in which Britain was haunted by a sustained period of strikes that eventually brought Margaret Thatcher to election victory. The name refers to Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York….” See also Hay, Colin. 2010. “Chronicles of a Death Foretold: The Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism.” Parliamentary Affairs, 63(3), 446–70.
- 5.
The first two were published as Lock, Stephen; L. A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey. 1998. Ashes to Ashes : The History of Smoking and Health. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, Reynolds, L. A. and E. M. Tansey. 2000. “Clinical Research in Britain 1950–1980.” Wellcome Trust, 7(7). The third is archived at the Wellcome Library: http://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1946919__SGale,%20Robert%20Peter.__P0,3__Orightresult__X1;jsessionid=CFA74E92884D5DE50E02B3172212F614?lang=eng&suite=cobalt [Accessed on March 31, 2015].
- 6.
See especially Doel, Ronald Edmund, and Thomas Söderqvist. 2006. The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine: Writing Recent Science. London; New York: Routledge, Söderqvist, Thomas. 1997. The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic.For very perceptive essays on the problems and issues surrounding the writing of “the history of now,” see Hughes, Jeff. 1997. “Whigs, Prigs and Politics: Problems in the Historiography of Contemporary Science.” The Historiography of Science and Technology, 19–37; Lewenstein, Bruce V. 2006. “The History of Now: Reflections on Being a “Contemporary Archivist”; R. E. Doel and T. Söderqvist, The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine: Writing Recent Science. London and New York: Routledge; Weintraub, E. Roy. 2005. “Autobiographical Memory and the Historiography of Economics.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 27(1), 1–11, ____, 2010; “Breit and Hirsch, Eds., Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-Three Nobel Economists.” History of political economy., 42(4), 779–82, ____., 2007. “Economists Talking with Economists, an Historian’s Perspective,” P. A. Samuelson and W. A. Barnett, Inside the Economist’s Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., l-11; Weintraub, E. Roy and Evelyn L. Forget. 2007. Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
- 7.
See, for example, Bardsley, Nick; Robin Cubitt; Graham Loomes; Peter Moffatt; Chris Starmer and Robert Sugden. 2010. Experimental Economics: Rethinking the Rules. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Santos, Ana Cordeiro dos. 2009. The Social Epistemology of Experimental Economics. London: Routledge. Also issues of Economics and Philosophy and Journal of Economic Methodology are peppered with contributions on the methodological questions posed by the experiment in economics.
- 8.
“Observation in Natural and Social Sciences, Historically Considered,” opening workshop of NWO project Observation in economics, historically considered, March 12–13, 2009, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam.
- 9.
The literature is too vast to cover here. Classic references are Collins, Harry M. 1985. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. London; Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Galison, Peter. 1987. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ____. 1997. Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Knorr Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
For a recent reflection on histories of the laboratory, see Kohler, Robert E. 2008. “Lab History: Reflections.” Isis, 99(4), 761–68, and subsequent articles in that focus section of Isis for further references. Histories of the experiment and the laboratory have predominantly investigated the experiment/laboratory in the natural sciences, in medicine, and in psychology.
- 10.
The spouses included Marcia Friedman, Martha Ann Talman (wife of Charlie Holt), Harriette Kagel, Marianna Plott, and Candace Smith.
- 11.
There has been a joint session at the ASSA between the History of Economics Society (HES) and the Economic Science Association (ESA) on the twenty-fifth anniversary of ESA (2012), a similar session organized by the ESA itself (2012), and another session on experimental economics’ history at ASSA (2013) and the relationship of economics and psychology at ASSA (2015) that were also attended by experimental economists.
- 12.
Friedman’s Yale classmate F. Trenery Dolbear who also wrote an experimental thesis was offered a job at Carnegie as well, but unlike Friedman he took it.
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Maas, H., Svorenčík, A. (2016). A Witness Seminar on the Emergency of Experimental Economics. In: Svorenčík, A., Maas, H. (eds) The Making of Experimental Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20952-4_1
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