As I was clearing out some stuff, I came across a January 1991 special centenary edition of the Economic Journal. The editors invited 22 distinguished economists to speculate about the next 100 years of their discipline.

It’s fascinating to see the similarity of the points made about the changes under way, or needing to get under way, in economics then and now. Will Baumol warns that there is too much mathematics for its own sake in economics. He welcomes the new research in behavioural economics but says it is disappointing to see how slowly it is being incorporated into economists’ everyday work – he suggests this is because behavioural economists have spent too little time researching when people (or animals) act rationally and when instead their behavioural biases take over. Andrew Oswald was encouraged by the growing use of microeconomic data sets to do empirical work. Frank Hahn predicts that evolutionary theory will contribute more to economics, and Charles Plott says that in general economics will move closer to the life sciences, with particular focus on how people’s preferences are formed. Richard Schmalensee says economists will have to pay more attention to the effects of technology in service industries, and the importance of R&D and intellectual property.

So you could end up feeling pessimistic that the debate – and the subject – has moved on little since 1991. Or optimistic that the encouraging current trends to use maths more sparingly and psychology more often, to look at evolutionary models, or big questions like technology and jobs have such long and deep roots among economists – perhaps economics will actually develop in this way.

The one constant that is truly depressing is the low proportion of women included in this high-profile special issue – zero. But I fear that the same exercise now would result in only 1 or 2 women being invited to contribute. The problem isn’t that there are not enough good female economists, for there are plenty. It’s in the social construction of careers in economics and the definition of what makes an economist ‘good’.