As an editor of a tutorial journal, inhabiting the bigger universe of academia, I’m regularly amazed at how nicely folks know their chosen topic. Robert E. Lucas captured a few of this sentiment in a 1998 interview, when requested if it was essential for economists to even be competent historians. Lucas replied
No. It will be significant that some economists be competent historians, simply as it is crucial that some economists be competent mathematicians, competent sociologists, and many others. However there isn’t a want or alternative for everybody to be good at every thing. Like Stephen Dedalus, none of us will ever be greater than a shy visitor on the world tradition get together.
(The quote is from Brian Snowdon and Howard R. Vane, “Remodeling macroeconomics:
an interview with Robert E. Lucas Jr.”, Journal of Financial Methodology, 1998, 5:1, 115-146, with commentary p. 121.(
In fact, Stephen Dedalus is the protagonist of tJames Joyce’s 1916 novel Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man. Here is Joyce’s unique “shy visitor” remark:
The pages of his time-worn Horace have been by no means chilly to the contact, even when his personal fingers have been chilly; they have been human pages and fifty years earlier than they’d been turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and his brother, William Malcolm Inverarity. Sure, they have been noble names on the darkish flyleaf, and even for such a poor Latinist as himself the darkish verses have been as aromatic as if they’d rested all these years in myrtle, lavender, and verbena; however but it damage him to suppose that he would by no means be greater than a timid visitor on the feast of world tradition and that the monastic information, by way of which he strove to forge an aesthetic philosophy, was not held. tall by age. during which he lived than the delicate and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.
I’ve been the editor of the Journal of Financial Views for 36 years now. I feel I am good at work. However I am nonetheless a shy visitor on the get together.