ABSTRACT
Sheila Dow, Arjo Klamer, and Deirdre McCloskey are a venerable threesome. The three are among the few economists who started talking about modernism and postmodernism back in the 1980s. Early on, each contributed several noteworthy papers that specified one (among many) problems within contemporary economics to be about modernism and its excesses. These papers, taken together, constitute some of the first and finest work from economists about the impending ‘implosion’ of modernist economics – its impossibility to go on blithely and securely – and the equally impending emergence of ‘something else’, postmodernism perhaps, or perhaps not. The papers Dow, Klamer, and McCloskey have written for this volume have the tone of a wisened and collective reevaluation, a taking stock and look back at where their own concerns about modernism and the economics profession’s trajectory in the past two decades have left this something else.
