Today's Standards and Yesterday's Economics - Two Short Occasional Essays: Eliminating History from Economic Thought and Mark Blaug on the Quantity Theory

The first of these essays was written for a happy occasion – my acceptance of honorary membership in the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. The second marked an altogether sadder event - the death of Mark Blaug. Though at first sight their topics are very different, both in fact deal with some of the limitations inherent in applying contemporary criteria, in the first case those of modern equilibrium modeling, and in the second, those of empirically oriented positive economics, to understanding and assessing the economics of the past.