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how our notion of what is proper has changed over time. (I'll say more on the subject later in this lecture
and elaborate further in the third lecture). But what seems clear to me is that the reason that the
development theory that emerged in the 1940s and the economic geography that emerged more or less
in parallel failed to "make it" into mainstream economics was the inability of their creators to express
their ideas in a way suitable for the modeling techniques available at the time. In both development and
geography the crucial problem, in particular, was the inability of the field's pioneers to be explicit about
market structure that is, about the conditions of competition in the hypothetical economies they were
describing. It's a subtle problem; indeed, it is virtually impossible to explain why it is an issue at all to
anyone who has not tried to engage in serious economic modeling. And yet the market structure issue
proved fatal to efforts to integrate both development and geography into the mainstream of economic
theory.
All this may sound fairly abstract. So let me turn to my first example: the story of the rise, fall, and
resurrection of development economics.
Once upon a time there was a field called development economics a branch of economics concerned
with explaining why some countries are so much poorer than others, and with prescribing ways for poor
countries to become rich. In the field's glory days in the 1950s the ideas of development economics
were regarded as revolutionary and important, and commanded both great intellectual prestige and
substantial real-world influence. Moreover, development economics attracted creative minds and was
marked by a great deal of intellectual excitement.
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