caa a22 4500 388040378 CHVBK 20180307125019.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199806 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S105383720000184X doi S105383720000184X pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S105383720000184X Barber William J. Not So Dismal a Science: Reflections [Elektronische Daten] [William J. Barber] Academic economists tend to come in two varieties. One type identifies a substantive specialism at the outset of a career and continues to cultivate it. A second type is more likely to respond to the American Economic Association's twice-a-decade requests for information about sub-specialties by providing a number of differing answers over the course of a professional lifetime. I accept Adam Smith's arguments about the gains from specialization arising from a widened division of labor, but I am also conscious that Smith held that excessive specialization could contribute to boredom in the workplace. In any event, I am temperamentally a Type II economist who has greatly enjoyed working on diverse scholarly topics. I am also aware of a number of turning points that have conditioned my world with consequences that I could not have foreseen. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Journal of the History of Economic Thought Cambridge University Press 20/2(1998-06), 177-189 1053-8372 20:2<177 1998 20 HET https://doi.org/10.1017/S105383720000184X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S105383720000184X text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Barber William J. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of the History of Economic Thought Cambridge University Press 20/2(1998-06), 177-189 1053-8372 20:2<177 1998 20 HET CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge