Masahiro Kawamata - Retiring in AY2022

I taught the history of economics in the Faculty of Economics, and that in itself was the most valuable part of my teaching career. This is because not many people who study the history of economics get to teach it as a lecture course. Having been a science student until I entered university, I had trouble adjusting to economics. I began to question why the various theories called "economics" were established as an academic discipline, which led me to research the history of theories connected to modern mainstream economics. Being able to teach a general history course in the Faculty of Economics allowed me to resolve, to some extent, the various questions I had when I started my research, and I have no regrets about my research.

When I entered university in the 1970s, the influence of Thomas Kuhn's methodology of scientific revolutions, which innovated scientific methodology based on the history of science, began to extend to the study of the history of economics. This is the idea that science progresses through scientific revolutions, which are paradigm shifts. In the history of economics, the question of whether the development of economics in the 1870s, known as the "marginal revolution," was a scientific revolution in Kuhn's sense was debated at an international conference held in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy. The task of reconsidering the history of economics based on Kuhn's methodology was a popular research trend at the time, and his concept of a paradigm spread rapidly, attracting many researchers. There are a relatively large number of researchers in the history of economics in my generation, and this background is the main reason.

By the way, research in a specialized field is significant for discovering unknown knowledge and producing new "flow" research results, such as inventions. However, the history of economics is, in a sense, a mature field, and in addition to producing "flow" research results, it is very important to organize the "stock" of accumulated research findings. Therefore, while in a typical specialized course the lecture content does not differ greatly from the instructor's area of expertise, if one tries to literally lecture on the general history of economics, about 70% of the content will involve teaching various theories that one has never researched before. In my case, although my lecture notes for economic theory were completed in my third year, it took me eight years to deliver the lectures on the history of economics as I intended and to publish the content as a textbook.

Incidentally, I later heard an anecdote that in 1977, just after I entered university, Professor Kyuzo Yuge, who was in charge of the history of economics, passed away suddenly. Professor Yasuhira Iida took over, but he struggled to cope, as it is very difficult to suddenly start lecturing on the history of economics. In my case, since IT had advanced considerably, I created lecture materials for unfamiliar topics by scanning various sources, converting them to text with OCR, and editing them. In class, I managed by distributing these materials and explaining them. Looking back, I continued to benefit from the practical application of IT throughout my 34 years as a teacher. The recent online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic were very unfortunate for the students, but for me, it was a learning experience to discover the convenience of remote work.

My research theme is the history of mainstream economic theory, so a crucial step in my research is to formally interpret ambiguous historical theories based on modern theory. However, as the discipline of economics became institutionalized, publishing research papers came to require formally expressing the research content, clearly stating its motivation and significance, and conducting thorough surveys of prior research to be cited. Once a theory becomes institutionalized and formalized, the development of the economic theory itself becomes, in a sense, self-evident, and the need to explain it decreases significantly. As a result, current research in the history of economics has shifted its focus to somewhat secondary themes, such as non-mainstream theories and the relationship between economics and other fields of social science or the research environment. This is also a result of the maturation of the history of economics as a discipline and the accumulation of knowledge.

In fact, since the time I entered university, big data has been generated in economics as well, leading to the advancement of empirical research based on it and the accumulation of empirically grounded arguments. Research rooted in empirical evidence, such as experimental economics and behavioral economics, has progressed, and there are an increasing number of fields where research outcomes from economic theory, like market design theory, are directly implemented in society and prove useful. Even the person I was when I entered university would likely have few doubts about modern economics as an academic discipline. You could say it's time for my research to come to an end.