I never cease to be amazed by how much economics as a profession has forgotten down the decades.

Today, my research led me to a 1990 paper by Ronald Coase entitled ‘Accounting and the Theory of the Firm’. It was published shortly before he was awarded the 1991 ‘Nobel Prize’ in Economics. Coase reminisces about the early part of his research career in the 1930s:

It was then widely believed that bank credit played a crucial role in generating and intensifying the business cycle

Eighty years later, in the wake of the (ongoing) financial crisis, mainstream academic macroeconomics research is reinventing the wheel  discovering the importance of including bank credit in macroeconomic models.

History of Economic Thought was removed from the curriculum of the University of Oxford MPhil a few years ago. The same was done in many universities. We badly need History of Economic Thought to be reinstated on the curriculum.