Yesterday, I thought there were only two other Canadian academic economists with blogs: John Palmer’s Eclectic Econoclast and Brian Ferguson’s Canadian Econoview. But today I’m delighted to add Sandra Peart’s Adam Smith Lives! to that list (thanks to Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy for the pointer).

Sandra’s mission is to haul economic history to its rightful place, and its rightful place is not at the margins of the mainstream:

Why does the past matter? If ideas, like markets, are interrelated, then what we don’t read has implications for our understanding (or lack of) of what we do read. Sometimes, the gap in understanding will be small and unimportant. When it comes to understanding the opposition to economics, this is probably not a safe assumption. If we are ever to engage that opposition in serious discussion – to convince our reading public that, for instance, free trade is not such a bad thing – we need fully to appreciate the origin, influence, and longevity of old ideas and debates.

This is an important point. Economists spend most of our time trying to convince other economists, using the tools that economists teach each other: mathematical modelling, econometrics, etc. We make no excuses for that: you can’t do serious economics without them. But these tools are virtually useless when it comes time to explain our theories to non-economists.

[Full disclosure: In claiming Sandra for Canada, I’m intentionally overlooking the inconvenient fact that she’s at a US school because a) she’s originally from Canada, and b) we went to grad school together at the University of Toronto.]