A Pall along the Watchtower: On Leaving the HOPE Conference

All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason becomes improbable.. .. Does the good historian not, at bottom, contradict? —Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak We changed " extract " in the first page of the article to " epigraph. " Please check. Precisely because the experience of the 2001 HOPE conference was a bit unnerving, I want to start out with a vote of thanks to Roy Wein-traub and Craufurd Goodwin for coming up with the idea. Rarely have we enjoyed the opportunity to talk seriously and openly about the future prospects and pitfalls of our chosen field. So occasions such as this, where we collectively stare our predicament squarely in the face, are exceedingly scarce. It is even more rare to be confronted by the possibility that the history of economics as a disciplinary identity is on its last legs. Now, the one capacity that you might suspect is congenitally rare in a collocation of historians is a well-developed ability to engage in fu-turology. Economists as a group have never enjoyed high lifetime completion averages in the realm of prediction; and I suspect people who have specialized in history are more inclined than most to avoid what can only be considered a high-risk, low-return activity like prognosti-cation. True to form, few attendees at this conference engaged in any concerted reading of the tea leaves; more to the point, they tended to avert their gaze when it threatened to precipitate. Rather, the overriding impression I got from the papers and the conference was of a wistful sadness and a vague premonition of disaster; maybe nothing so portentous