Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
segunda-feira, 6 de agosto de 2012
Phyllis Deane: homenagem a uma grande historiadora da Revolucao Industrial
Uma lágrima para quem enriqueceu intelectualmente minha (nossa) vida.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Phyllis Deane: death
Phyllis Deane is Professor Emeritus of Economic History in the University of Cambridge where she held research and teaching positions from 1950 to 1982 with great distinction. She was editor of the Economic Journal (1968-75) and president of the Royal Economic Society (1980-82). She became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980.
Phyllis Deane was born in 1918, and if you do the math, you can understand why she is unable to be here to accept this award.
After working on a research project on post-war reconstruction, she was invited to join the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to develop social accounting for the colonies. Colleagues included Keynes, Richard Stone, James Meade, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis.
She spent 1946-7 “getting her hands dirty”, as she describes it, producing national income accounts for Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Her work is being studied by Mary Morgan and others as part of the history of observation in economics project.
Richard Stone invited Phyllis Deane to the recently established Department of Applied Economics initially to work on regional social accounts. There, she became involved with the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, led by Simon Kuznets. It brought together academic and government economists interested in the causes of growth and the reasons for international disparities in growth rates. She began to study British national income historically. Her findings were published in a series of journal articles, which formed the backbone of her best known work: British Economic Growth, 1688-1959 (written with Max Cole). It is difficult to over-estimate the significance of this work in twentieth-century economic history. It represented the foundation of British quantitative economic history and guided and inspired a generation of economic historians.
She was appointed to a Lecturship in 1961 lectures on the industrial revolution for first-year economists led to another classic book: The First Industrial Revolution.
From the sixties onwards, Phyllis Deane’s teaching and research turned increasingly to the history of economic thought. Partly because she was in a Faculty, which was deeply involved in theoretical disputes, she became interested in the origins and evolution of debates within economics. Her approach was not to identify flaws in arguments or engage in ancestor worship (or its opposite!) but to try to understand how ideas evolved. Two more books The Evolution of Economic Ideas and The State and the Economic System, and several articles
followed.
On retirement she embarked upon a biography of economist John Neville Keynes, The Life and Times of J. Neville Keynes. A Beacon in the Tempest was published in 2001.
Her work has extended the frontiers of our subject – both economic history and the history of economics – brought a deeper understanding, and provided essential guides, through what she has called the “varied landscape” of economics.
It is with great pleasure that we name Phyllis Deane a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.