David Warsh at Economic Principals has for decades written intelligently on economic issues. I first became aware of Warsh’s work through Tyler Cowen in 1984. Tyler and I at the time both had a strong interest in the debates within Austrian Economics on the role of equilibrium. Tyler had written a large manuscript on complexity in economics and the social sciences that I had studied closely in trying to sort all of this out. Tyler alerted me to Warsh’s book On the Idea of Economic Complexity (1984) during one of our conversations and I’ve been reading Warsh’s columns ever since first in the Boston Globe and now on-line. I don’t always agree with him, but when he gets it right, he usually gets it really right. Such is the case with his discussion of the awarding of the John Bates Clark Award this year to Daron Acemoglu and how that relates to the nature of economic thinking in the 20th century. Warsh argues that economic thought over the past century can be viewed as an hour glass — where the questions in the late 19th century and early 20th century were broad ranging, but narrowed considerably after WWII and as the 20th century ended they started to open up again to broad ranging questions in philosophy, politics, history, religion as they relate to economics.
I established the Workshop in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at GMU and also a book series that with Edward Elgar precisely to take advantage of this opening up the economic discourse and encourage interdisciplinary scholarship in political economy.
BTW, Warsh has a new book forthcoming Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: The Story of Economic Discovery that will be published in the spring of 2006. I have already placed my advanced order.