The Australian Business Deans Council has in its preliminary report indicated that it would lower the journal ranking of History of Political Economy to a B which if it did would merely display, for all to see, what a Philistine bunch of ignoramuses they are. They are for nuts and bolts, debits and credits, tangibles and assets, not this academically philosophical, highly abstract historical economics kind of stuff, which is actually what a proper education consists of, including a business education.

For those as far from economics as a council made up of the deans of schools of business, this may seem a remote and unimportant area of study. The reality is that it is an area of study at the very forefront of economic theory. As just one example, one of the great monetary theorists in the world today, David Laidler, has just written an article on “Three Revolutions in Macroeconomics: Their Nature and Influence” going back over the historical development of three different revolutionary episodes in macroeconomics and in which he ends the abstract with these words: “some implications of this story for today’s macroeconomics are briefly discussed.” Nor is he the only major economist who has done important work in the History of Economics. Nobel Prize winners, including Paul Samuelson and George Stigler, have done extensive research in this area, not as a way to pass the time but as real and genuine contributions to our understanding of how economies work.

I have even written a book just this year on the crucial importance of this area titled, Defending the History of Economic Thought (Elgar 2013). This may be an area that is under-appreciated even amongst economists but when the moment of truth came in 2007 to remove the History of Economic Thought from within the economics classification, there was an uprising amongst economists in general, not only across the academic world but encompassing economists at every level reaching right through to the secretaries of every economics-related department in the Federal public service. It should therefore not be left to the tender mercies of the deans of schools of business to make such negative determinations about the value of journals in one of the most important areas of economics.