Recent studies have revalued Hazel Kyrk for her original works on consumption and the critique of neoclassical demand theory. Kyrk’s A Theory of Consumption (1923) opened up new perspectives for understanding the nature of consumption and revalued home economics as a central part of the economist agenda, taking distance from the first generation of home economists. This paper focuses on Kyrk’s post-1923 scientific production and professional activities. Our main purpose is to show her contributions to the quantitative foundations of consumption together with her attempt to feed contemporary research on consumers’ behavior with pragmatism, policy advice, and field knowledge. We selected specific issues: the education of consumers through information and a strategy of “critical consumption”; the analysis of strategic industries; the well-being of American families; and the importance of “invisible” objects (non-market activities) and their statistical processing.

The History of Economics Society (HES) initiated the History of Economics Society Bulletin (HESB) in 1979. Discussed at the 1978 meetings of the HES, the HESB was first conceived of as something “less” than History of Political Economy (HOPE)—i.e., an academic journal with a defined editorial line—but also “more” than just a newsletter for HES members (Caldwell 2021; Vaughn, this issue). Edited by Karen E. Vaughn (1979 to 1983) and William O. Thweatt (1984 to 1989), the HESB began by publishing short notes and abstracts of papers presented at the annual meetings of the HES. Research articles (i.e., peer-reviewed documents) appeared for the first time in 1988 and book reviews in 1989. A year after, the HESB became the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET), a full-fledged society journal under the editorship of Donald Walker (1990 to 1998). First published directly by its editor and the HES, the JHET started producing four yearly issues in 1998 under contract with Carfax as publisher. Carfax was eventually purchased by Taylor & Francis (Medema, this issue), and a new contract was signed with Cambridge University Press, both during Steven Medema’s editorship (1999 to 2008).1

The invitation is to discuss my JHET editorship, which ran from 2013 to 2018, in light of the once and future challenges of the journal. After accepting it, I gathered my recollections, perused back issues of the journal, and finally reviewed my correspondence and reports to the HES Executive Committee.

The literature on John Maynard Keynes’s activity as an investor has substantially grown in the last decade (e.g., Chambers and Dimson 2013; Accominotti and Chambers 2016; Chambers and Kabiri 2016; Cristiano, Marcuzzo, and Sanfilippo 2018; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2018; Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016, [2020] 2022). The contribution of the present paper is to investigate a specific feature of Keynes’s investment activity on his own account: his preference for American rather than British Investment Trusts. While this feature has also been observed in his investments on behalf of King’s College (Chambers and Kabiri 2016), we focus here on his personal portfolio, and we also provide a set of possible explanations for his preference. We maintain that some reasons have to do with the different structure and characteristics of the Investment Trusts in the two countries. Others relate more closely to the kind of investment policy typically adopted by the American Investment Trusts, which was much more in line with Keynes’s own approach to investment—especially regarding the stocks selection. We also attribute a role to his epistemological approach, i.e., the view that, although a full and perfect knowledge is not reachable by individuals due to the radical uncertainty characterizing the environment (“we simply don’t know,” Keynes 1937) and to the limitations of the human mind, reliable information remains, however, a guide for rational decision making, also in financial markets. Following this approach, as we will show, Keynes preferred to delegate his investment choices in the US stock market to those professionals—the managers of the Investment Trusts—who possessed, in his opinion, the wider set of reliable information on that market, while keeping for himself the investment choices in the UK stock market.

The twenty years surrounding the regulation of Ashdown Forest in 1885 reveal locally complex tensions and interactions. Designed to ensure the environmental protection of the Forest and to end internal dissent among those connected to it, regulation failed. Instead, protracted in-place conflict continued, as working families rejected new legislation which threatened their livelihoods. So the new body of conservators was faced with balancing such protection with the customary uses by commoners, with the working practices of ‘foresters’, with resurgent calls for small-scale farming, and with the ever-increasing residential numbers by the 1880s, many seeking ‘nature’ and ‘the primitive’, but also social tone. And increasingly, from beyond the locality, came the calls for environmental protection, especially from the newly formed Commons Preservation Society, urged on by newspaper articles recommending the fresh air and ‘natural’ beauty of Ashdown to townsfolk as a rural idyll or for moral improvement.

How are infrastructures socially appropriated? This article uses my fortuitous presence in a rural locality in eastern India as its residents discussed proposals for its complete electrification, allowing me to reflect on social negotiations around infrastructure prior to its installation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of electrification in a West Bengal village, I illustrate the nuanced ways in which people inflect infrastructural projects with their collective ideas of what is right and good. As far as they can see, such projects are neither the unalloyed benefit that proponents celebrate nor the unmitigated evil that opponents lament. Rather, they are evaluated in relation to people’s imagination of the collective good, to which such infrastructures may or may not be central. Drawing on the insights offered by my interlocutors as well as recent advances in the literature on the politics of infrastructures, this article interrogates the perspective that infrastructures advance governmental rationalities. Building on well-established insights that technological infrastructures are not socially neutral and that infrastructures are socially appropriated, disputed, and negotiated, this article demonstrates that people’s engagement with infrastructures politicizes, rather than governmentalizes, them.

The International Journal of Cultural Property (IJCP) is proud to award yearly the Pierre Lalive and John Henry Merryman Fellowship in Art and Cultural Heritage Law, hosted by the International Cultural Property Society and the Art-Law Centre of the University of Geneva.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.