 For you to appreciate economics, and this is a problem, I think, with a lot of the way the economics is taught today, where it's taught sort of linearly, like you just learn your model, and then you just repeat that model over and over and over again, with ever-increasing technical sophistication, which makes it seem like it's just everything, you know, is settled. You know, all you have to do is apply it. And by delving into the history of economics, I thought you realize a little bit that it is more open, always has been. My name is Gonzalo Fonseca. I am the writer and editor and creator of the History of Economics website from the ancient times until the modern day. And it's directed at students and the general public who want to learn about economics from a historical perspective. And what the website does is organize them in a way that's both useful and entertaining so you can get into it in various ways. It's organized as part of an alphabetical index where you can go through an economist's profile and sort of see the works, a little bit about him and the works that he's worked on. If the resources are available for those works, you'll link directly to them or the resources about them. There's another channel that you go in through the schools of thought where economists are sort of organized. It's not very strictly defined. Some of them are well known, like the Austrian school or the Chicago school. But others are a little more sort of conveniently constructed just for the website. But it's just sort of a way to sort of see how economists relate to each other. And then there's a series of essays and surveys on particular topics and you can go through them and you'll see sort of the history of a topic or the history of a field. And it makes it easy to move between profiles, topics, schools. And so you get a sort of rich sense of how economists have been related to each other over time. Why is the history of economics thought important? Almost like asking why is economics important? I mean, economics, if you think about what economics is, I mean, it's essentially a science, a field, a discipline, I don't care where do you use there, but it's essentially a set of ideas about factual phenomenon that people have been coming up with to sort of explain things. And so it's something economics, modern economics is something that comes out of human creativity. And human creativity has a history. So what we identify as economics, modern economics, is just the outcome of that history of human creativity. And it's sometimes economists think that okay, we don't need to know the past, but it's nice to know that at that element of it. Because when you think about it, economics is an edifice that's been constructed over time generation after generation by people, series of figures through mentors and proteges, through criticism and correction, through cooperation, through rivalry, through proofs and conjectures, through flashes of brilliance individual, but also just waves of fashion, there are periods of ideology and periods of rebellion. So what economics is today is an outcome of this really, really messy squabble that has happened over the last couple hundred years. So that's sort of what I believe economics is. And that's how I like to present it. And it's not so much that the history of economics thought in principle presents it that way. It shows it to you. You can actually look at it and see the squabble, see that it hasn't been just a simple linear progress, it's a great perfection, but just a really, really messy process. And it shows that it's also still open-ended, that the debate is not over, that the debates continue, that the struggles continue, the fights continue and sort of it. For you to appreciate economics, and this is a problem, I think, with a lot of the way the economics is taught today, where it's taught sort of linearly, like you just linear model and then you just repeat that model over and over and over again with ever increasing technical sophistication, which makes it seem like it's just everything, you know, is settled. You know, all you have to do is apply it. And by delving into the history of economics, I thought you realize a little bit that it is more open-ended, it always has been, that there are, that it's not a settled topic, that debates go on, that debates continue, and those debates, you know, resurrect the old questions back, keep coming back again and again and again. So this is sort of the value of learning history of economics thought as part of any economics education. So why the history of economics thought? Well, why economics? It's the same answer to be the question. History of economics thought used to be part of every graduate program in economics. It used to be standard training. And we see this with other fields like political science or these sort of fields. You always learn the history of your subject because it's thought to be an important topic, an important part of the formation of anybody. Since the 70s, history of economics thought programs, history of economics thought courses have sort of been dropped from the curriculum. So there's an entire generation now, several generations of economists and students who've never learned anything about the history of their subject. They have no idea about it and they go on to teach still without that idea, without any idea about it. So this is a huge blinder in a lot of education of many economists. The ideal for there would be for some curriculum reform of some kind to bring history of economics thoughts back into a graduate program. There's a little prospect of that. Graduate programs are not interested in teaching the history of economics thought anymore because they've got to fill those graduate programs with statistical courses, math courses, things that improve economist skills. So they had to drop history of economics thought on the side. That's their excuse. The history of economics thought website sort of fills that gap. And let's put it that way. If the graduate program's not going to teach it, well, we'll teach it. And that was sort of the motivation behind it. They don't want to teach it. We can teach it. And that's been sort of the most rewarding part of it is, I think, for me is like hearing not so much from people who already interested in the history of economics thought, but hearing from people who never were interested in the history of economics thought saying, oh, okay, this was interesting. Tell me more. Economists who had no inkling of it suddenly come across it, find it interesting and find intriguing and sources of new ideas. It's always been a public good. Like it's never been sort of a for profit for a celebration or for taking any angle or any perspective. It the only perspective it takes is that there is a lot of ideas. So it's a pluralistic perspective if you want. It doesn't try to denigrate or promote any particular view. I wrote for the history of economics thought about over maybe a thousand economists profiles 100 pages on schools of thought and close to the same number of essays and surveys on various topics. What I believe all education should be, not merely in which age it is apart, should present subjects as open debate, should present subjects as a subject matter, not techniques, and should prove that there is no trade off between breadth and depth, that learning more about new topics actually gives you better ideas in your existing topic. You can make a career out of an inch of depth, but with an extra mile of breadth, you can really go in deep into topics more deep into your own specialization and bring in new ideas from outside and bring new ways of thinking into economics. And economics kind of needs that sort of been stuck in a rut of just a repetitive rut of producing the same generation. So it needs that sort of breath of fresh air of opening up and keeping students who are creative, keeping students who are challenging, keeping students who are interested in the economy and not merely those who simply want to do the same models over and over again.