Barry Eichengreen - Why Economics Needs History

interview by Perry G. Mehrling

Institute for New Economic Thinking
July 11, 2011

What challenges will China have to surmount in order to make its currency a true international currency? To answer this question and others, Barry Eichengreen studies history. In the old days, he says, historians and theorists worked smoothly together and saw one another as serious scholars. But those days are gone, and nowadays the profession largely neglects historical and institutional research. That's why Barry Eichengreen is running the Berkeley Economic History Lab to educate a future generation of scholars -- a generation that is historically literate and does policy-relevant research. These are the seeds of new economic thinking.

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987.

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