Today's standards and yesterday's economics - two short occasional essays: Eliminating history from economic thought and Mark Blaug on the quantity theory

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models, which helped generate the data against which today's models are tested, differed from the latter. Such analysis denies that economics has a relevant history, and its current dominance explains the decline of the history of economic thought within the discipline. [Mark Blaug on the quantity theory: A skirmish on the border between science and politics in the history of economic thought] Mark Blaug brought his usual standards of historical awareness and respect for empirical content to bear when he wrote about the Quantity Theory of Money, but he hesitated to probe too deeply into the political and ideological elements of its history, perhaps leading him to underestimate their importance for the theory's evolution.