Irwin Collier on Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, Episode 10

Guest: Irwin Collier, Free University of Berlin Hosted and produced by Reinhard Schumacher In this episode Irwin Collier, professor of Economics at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, talks about his project Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, which recently celebrated its third anniversary. On his website, Irwin is collecting and making available teaching resources used in economics programmes at US universities. These resources include syllabi, exams, and lecture notes. His project is covering the period from roughly 1870 – 1970. So far, the website features more than 750 artefacts, including documents from Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Frank Knight, and many more well-known and lesser-known economists. Irwin’s website is a treasure for historians of economics, and a treasure that is still growing. The interview covers the motivation and aim of the project, some technical and archival topics, as well as some lessons on the development of economics from 1870–1970 that can be drawn from the project so far.