Interview with Amitava K. Dutt: ‘I have never held models as depictions of anything real; they are just tools for understanding some aspects of the real world’

[...]there was the theory on the one hand and there was the real world on the other. [...]the first paper that I wrote for my thesis was what eventually became the stagnation and income distribution paper (Dutt 1984). [...]Lance advised me to present that paper for my job talks, perhaps because it was theoretically somewhat sophisticated. [...]Edward Amadeo, who was doing a PhD at Harvard and also working with Lance, and whom I had not met before (but I worked with him later), wrote to me about some things and also told me by the way that there is this paper by Robert Rowthorn in an obscure journal and in the Thames Papers in Political Economy, and said it was mostly on the history of economic thought.