Welcome to HETSA 2012


The History of Economic Thought Society of Australia will celebrate its 25th Jubilee conference in Melbourne in July, 2012.  The conference will take place from Thursday, 5 July till Saturday afternoon 8 July in the historic Royal Society of Victoria Building, 1-9 Victoria Street, Melbourne. (It’s just a stone’s throw from where the 2011 conference, hosted by RMIT University, took place). 

For those booking flights, the HETSA cocktail party will launch the conference on Wednesday evening 4 July.

The 41ST Australian Conference of Economists will start just after our conference on the 9TH July at Victoria University, in Flinders Street, Melbourne.

There will be three Keynote speakers for our conference. Susan Howson from the University of Toronto, and a member of the editorial board of the History of Economics Review, will give a keynote address on the writing of her magnificent biography on Lionel Robbins which has just been published. Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished professor of economics at the University of Illinois in Chicago, will speak on ‘How ideology changed 1600-1848 and why it mattered’. Finally Larry White, professor of economics at George Mason University, will talk about his new book entitled ‘The Clash of Economic Ideas: the great policy experiments and debates of the last 100 years’. 

This year’s conference will have a session on the education of Australian economists and Max Corden, Joe Isaac and Geoff Harcourt will feature here.

The theme of this year’s conference will be ‘The Future of the History of Economic Thought’. Consequently we hope to have as many young Australian-based HET scholars to give papers on their research topics. In that regard please avail your research students of this opportunity and the concessional registration price.