In 1948, a new word, cybernetics, entered the language, thanks to the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine explained how intelligent machines and living organis…
During the global financial crisis of 2008, his name suddenly appeared everywhere, including the New Yorker, in a column titled “The Minsky Moment,” the Minsky moment being the term coined in 1998, so AI tells me, to refer to “a sudden, cat…
Roberto Pereira Silva, a HOPE Center Visiting Scholar, came to Duke in 2024 to examine the papers of Earl J. Hamilton (1899–1989), an economist who, in the late 1930s, helped found the US-based Economic History Association and whose papers
Traditionally, historians of economics have focused on economists on university faculties, the economists publishing articles in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. But economists
Friedrich Hayek: Economist? Check. Political philosopher? Check. Writer of “violent and more or less erotic” tragedies? “It’s a commonplace that people often dreamily aspire to be musicians, artists, poets, and so on,” says Dominic Walker,
A recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, Kenneth Arrow had a long career—he died in 2017, at age 95—making contributions in a number of areas, any one of which would have earned him an enduring and exalted place in the history of the di…
The mission of the Center for the History of Political Economy is to promote and support research in, and the teaching of, the history of economics. It supports an active Visiting Scholars program, a regular Workshop series, a Hope Lunch se…
For years, Malcolm Rutherford of the University of Victoria maintained and hosted on his university webpage links to grave sites of famous economists. With Malcolm's kind permission, the HOPE Center is now pleased to maintain and host his o…
The 2022 Summer Institute on the History of Economics will take place at Duke University from June 20 through June 29, 2022. The Institute will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the…
The 2026 Summer Institute on the History of Economics will take place at Duke University from June 2, through June 11, 2026. The Institute will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the…
The 2020 Duke Summer Institute will be held June 7-11, 2020. The 2020 Institute will take the form of a research workshop and is aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars who would like to work with a group of other, similarly si…
Introduction - by Stephen Meardon The five letters reproduced here are a correspondence between Don Patinkin and John Hicks from July 1957 to December 1958. The contributions of both economists were numerous, but foremost among them were th…