Wanted: The History of Economic Thought Course

When Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-jakti was appointed as the RI's Ambassador for the US, and later Coordinating Minister for the Economy, I was thinking whether the benefit justifies the loss of the FEUI for not having him teaching The History of Economic Thought. Dorodjatun is always an engaging speaker, and was the best for the course.

In fact, when he was away from the academic, upon hearing that the Faculty was considering to get rid of the course, perhaps due to lack of capable teacher, Aco and yours truly (yes, shamelessly I) had planned to take over and co-teach for the course. Not because I am good at it, but we think the course is too important to be scrapped out from the curriculum.

Fortunately, now Dorodjatun is back to Depok and, I assume, so is the course.

On The History of Economic Thought, Sukasah Syahdan of Akal & Kehendak lamented (liberally translated):

On one hopeful side, there are many young economists who have been and are studying in the UK, US, Australia, and other developed countries to specialize in this science. Yet, economics itself consists of various fields of specialization. Most of the country's economists have had high interest only in the applied and pragmatic side of the science. This is my subjective and non-permanent judgment. Nowadays, not many Indonesian economists are interested in specializing in economic thought; or if they did, only as supplemental trim. Nowadays, the History of Economic Thought is hardly taught in (the universities -my note) in the country. Thee Kian Wie, senior economic historian, to whom I sometime keep in touch with by email, is the only exception today.

Isn't it sad?

Well, it's the catch-22. Those young economists, being trained in mostly mainstream higher education have faced a trade-off between mastering those (bloody, bloody) quantitative approach and techniques to understand those so-called applied and pragmatic side of economics and spending more time reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics (heavy, heavy) textbooks.

Most opt for the former, simply because to survive you need to work on what they demand you to --at least in the first and the second year. By the following years, you'd get the comparative advantage in doing the applied economics and by then there is less reason to work on the economic thought.

But I am still optimistic. Coming from various schools of thought and traditions (either European-North American or Freshwater-Saltwater rivalry), we can expect those new breeds to be engaged in more fruitful public discussion in the near future --not the ones we observe in the media now, between economists and faux economists, or, even worse, amongst those faux economists themselves.

Few of them, I personally know, are real good on the History of Economic Thought and PPE in addition to their superb applied economics analysis.