34 Blaug: Edging Toward Full Appreciation.

This article profiles economic historian Mark Blaug. Blaug was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Netherlands, where his father was a successful raincoat manufacturer, the Raincoat King of the Netherlands. Following high school, Blaug attended New York University, where he quickly became an avowed Marxist. The Marxist theory that economic interests and economic forces are the foundations of all social and political conflicts led Blaug to the study of economics, and to a rapid abandonment of his Marxist view. He graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1950 and began Doctor of Philosophy work at Columbia. In 1962, still considering himself a European, Blaug joined the London Institute of Education as a professor in the new field of economics of education, a position he held for twenty-three years. Besides history of economic thought, Blaug also studies economic methodology. In 1980 he published The Methodology of Economics, or How Economists Explain. 16 In his autobiography, he describes himself as an unregenerate Popperian, 17 an adherent of Karl Popper's concept of predictionism, that is, the idea that theories must ultimately be judged by the accuracy of their prediction.