The Curious Culture of Economic Theory by Ran Spiegler

 Ran Spiegler has new book about the academic culture of the theory part of the Economics profession.  It's open source, so you can sample it online.

The Curious Culture of Economic Theory   by Ran Spiegler

The MIT Press, 2024

DOI:

 

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14884.001.0001

ISBN electronic:

 

9780262379038

Here's what it says on the website:

"An essay collection that insightfully explores the professional culture of contemporary economic theory, highlighting key features of successful economic theory from the last quarter century.

"When is a theoretical result taken seriously enough for economic application? How do theorists actively try to influence this judgment? What determines whether a new theoretical subfield adopts a “pure” or an “applied” style? How do theorists respond to economists' penchant for “rational” explanations of human behavior? These are just some of the questions regarding the professional culture of contemporary economic theory that Ran Spiegler attempts to answer in this incisive essay collection, The Curious Culture of Economic Theory. In exploring these questions, Spiegler addresses the norms that economic theorists apply as they produce, evaluate, and disseminate research.

"Introducing a new genre—a kind of cultural criticism of economic theory—the essays in this unique collection highlight elements of style and rhetoric that characterize classic pieces of economic theory from the last quarter century. For each piece, Spiegler offers a precise yet accessible exposition of modern classics of economic theory while placing them in the broader context of the field's professional culture. Affectionate in its criticism and anthropological in its approach, The Curious Culture of Economic Theory is as valuable a complement to standard textbooks in graduate-level economic theory, game theory, and behavioral economics as it is to the libraries of practicing economic theorists, academic economists, historians of economic thought, and philosophers of economics."

I first sampled Chapter 8, whose first sentence is given below:

Chapter 8: From Competitive Equilibrium to Mechanism Design in Eighteen Months 

"If I had to name one major shift in the sensibilities of economic theorists in the past half century, a prime candidate would be the way we conceptualize markets—from quasi-natural phenomena admired from afar to manmade institutions whose design can be tweaked by economist-engineers."