I just defended my habilitation, a rite de passage meant to evaluate an academic’s ability to develop a research program, to mentor graduate students and to hold a professorship. It’s a long process which begins with writing a thesis and ends up with answering two hours of questions from a peer jury. Part of the discussion looks like an unbounded meditation on the intellectual challenges ahead, with questions on methodology and future topics, yet the other is about navigating the financial and institutional constraints besetting the field, and they are especially critical in history of economics. The whole thing involves a deal of reflexivity and an insane amount of red tape.
Below is the list of topics I wrote down when preparing the defense, those I wish to see historians of recent economics research in the years to come. It is more a wish list than an actual research program…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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