David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) distinguishes among people who are tradition-minded, inner-directed, and outer-directed. His metaphors for the last two are people with a gyroscope and a radar, respectively. In economics we can distinguish between students who get a mindset from their graduate training – monetarists from Chicago, Keynesians from Yale, and model-builder/testers from MIT, to borrow a scrap of conversation with Assar Lindbeck – and regard them as inner-directed economists who absorbed their ideas from outside for all time in their youth. The outer-directed may acquire a new Weltanschauung from the peer group when they move from graduate school to a teaching or research position elsewhere, or they may systematically scan the world of economics looking for interesting ideas. This paper seeks to explore how economists, largely in the field of international economics, sell their ideas as evangelists, or acquire them, to the extent that they maintain some receptivity, on the receiving end.

The information explosion in the last quarter of this century has gotten out of hand, as is widely recognized. A century ago an economist would have been in touch with the ideas of all his or her peers through reading their books, combing a limited number of journals, and conducting correspondence. As economic literature grew exponentially – texts, monographs, syntheses, specialized journals, symposia, Festschriften, and the like – new devices were put in place to assist economists to scan that literature: more book reviews, abstracts, indexes, and articles reviewing the specialized literature.