2004 HES Presidential Address: Autobiographical Memory and the Historiography of Economics

Abstract

In his autobiographical piece, “A Jevonian Seditionist,” Sidney Weintraub ([1983]1989, p. 50) recalled that in 1957 he sent an offprint of his paper on the micro-foundations of aggregate supply to D. H. Robertson. He remembered that “Robertson generously wrote me that it was ‘lucid and definitive,’ and that thenceforth he would not return to the subject again. I confess that I have lost or misplaced his letter, along with the one by [Alan] Sproul, in my move to Canada, though they were prized possessions.” And I have my own memory of a conversation with Sidney in which he told me that Robertson had written in that letter “If this is not what Keynes meant, it is what he should have meant.”