WRITING a new book on the history of economics has been a delight. With manuscript due at the end of June, I have worked out its structure. Whenever there seems to be nothing much to say about Scotland’s economic situation, expect me to talk about what I have been writing.

I have been trying to do more than just discuss ideas, conveying an impression of some of the people who have shaped economics. Some of them, such as John Maynard Keynes, come across as morally good, and would have been excellent company.

With many exceptional thinkers, though, there is quite a bit of ego on display. Paul Samuelson, whose book Economics sold more than five million copies, always seemed to be keen to show that he was the cleverest man in the room. Admittedly, he usually was.

There are some sad stories, such as the death of Joseph Schumpeter’s wife in childbirth, and that of their baby. Schumpeter never fully recovered and his second wife had to be a mixture of business manager and nurse.

Alfred Marshall, in many ways the father of modern economics was perhaps the strangest of them all. He never seemed to get over a period of ill-health while still in his mid-30s. His correspondence quite quickly became querulous.

Perhaps he would have done better to follow the example of Irving Fisher, who passionately advocated vegetarianism, abstinence, and eugenics (as well as social health insurance and investment in public health) after a tuberculosis infection which lasted for three years.

It is a problem for my publishers that the history of economics is full of men. Women have only recently started to come to prominence. That is how it was, until quite recently. The book must recognise that reality but will try to balance it, recognising the role of women as almost necessarily subordinate partners in intellectual adventure.

The first will be Harriet Taylor, whom John Stuart Mill treated almost as a co-author of his Principles of Political Economy.

Mary Paley was the first woman to complete the moral sciences programme at Cambridge. After her marriage to Marshall, she was a dutiful wife, only coming into her own again as a widow, when she actively managed the economics library at Cambridge – endowed with Marshall’s royalties.

Elizabeth Boody supported Schumpeter in writing his two last books including his most popular one, Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy (which Schumpeter, an intellectual snob, liked to disdain).

After his death, while herself dying of breast cancer, she devoted her time to archiving his papers.

Keynes married the Russian ballerina and actress Lydia Lopokova. I will hazard a guess that he was the only economist to have had Vogue cover his wedding.

A devoted couple, they wrote to each other every day when they were apart. Keynes, who was deeply involved with Bloomsbury and passionate about dance turned into an impresario, organising the building of the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

Keynes always surrounded himself with capable researchers and in the 1930s, as he worked on The General Theory, Joan Robinson, whom my own lecturers called the woman who would have won the Nobel Prize had she been a man, had an important role in Keynes’s “Cambridge Circus”. In 1932, Milton Friedman arrived in Chicago as a postgraduate student. Jacob Viner, who taught the price theory course, which Friedman later took over, set his students in desks in alphabetical order.

That placed Friedman next to Rose Director. They married six years later – and in 1962, wrote Capitalism and Freedom, the first manifesto of the neoliberal movement, following it up with Free to Choose in 1980.

Throughout his career, Friedman had female co-authors – most notably Anna Schwartz, with whom he wrote A Monetary History of the United States, the book which re-established monetarist theories after the period of Keynesian dominance of economics.

Herbert Simon was perhaps the most complete social scientist of the 20th century, honoured for achievements in economics, psychology, management science, and artificial intelligence.

While still a graduate student, he met his wife, Dorothea, who was supporting her studies by working as a secretary at Chicago University. They published several papers together on topics in cognitive psychology and public administration. Yet in his autobiography, Simon mentions hardly any other women.

Lastly, George Akerlof and Janet Yellen were professors at Berkeley. Akerlof won the Nobel Prize, but they worked together on developing behavioural macroeconomic theory. Yellen has been the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and is the current Secretary of the Treasury. At last, some equality.

After 40 years, the Nobel scientific committee found a woman deserving of the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2009. The recipient was a political scientist, Elinor Ostrom.

At the time, many economists had not heard of her, but her work, which examined how organisations emerge to manage common resources without government intervention, is now much better known because it is a sound foundation for analysis of the political economy of climate change.

There have so far been as many women as Scots men who have won the Nobel Memorial Prize. Given that it is only the last 15 years that women have begun to win the John Bates Clark medal – given to an economist under 40, working in the US – it may be another two decades before female Nobel Memorial Prize winners become unremarkable. But it will happen.