Biography

In my undergraduate years at the University of Louvain in the second half of the 1960s, I engaged in a PPE program before the word existed as I combined a bachelor degree in philosophy, a ‘licence’ in sociology and a master in economics. My dissertation, entitled “Ownership and Control in Large Corporations” mixed economics and sociology.

In the course of my doctorate I spent one year as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (academic year 1971-2) with a Belgian-American Educational Foundation scholarship. During this stay, I followed a sequence of courses on industrial organization taught by Professor J. Bain, the main authority in the field at the time. Professor B. Ward, who was working on a book on applying T. Kuhn’s scientific revolution idea to economics, initiated me to methodological issues. This experience played a decisive role in shaping my professional aspirations, not to mention what I learned more broadly from an existential and political viewpoint living in Berkeley in the early 1970s.

After my dissertation, as a result of my acquaintance with American radical political economists, I became interested in Marxian theory. For a decade or so, I was a Marx scholar. My study of Marx led me to that of Smith and Ricardo. My next take was to work on Keynes. So, from one thing to another, I became a historian of economics.

Since the 1990s, I have mainly been working on two subjects. The first is the study of modern macroeconomics, initiated by Lucas and stabilized by Kydland and Prescott, which upended Keynesian macroeconomics. This research culminated in my 2016 book, A History of Macroeconomics from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond. The second is the Marshall-Walras divide, my claim being that Marshallian economics and Walrasian economics are alternative rather than complementary routes for implementing the neoclassical research program. I intend to assemble the different articles I have written on the subject into a book.

In recent years, my research interests have broadened. Jointly with Luca Pensieroso, I have written an article on the rise of a mainstream in economics and its evolution. Half of this work is concerned with a study of the new empirical streams which have become the new game in town – laboratory experimentation, randomized control trials, behavioral economics, and quasi-experimental work. Moreover, circumstances, such as the presence of a ‘Rethinking economics’ group at my home university, have led me to return to methodological issues. As a result, I have written articles on subjects like economics and ideology, pluralism, and mainstream and heterodoxy, several of them co-authored with Luca.

Laudatio, Sarton Prize, University of Ghent (2012)