History of Economics eJournal最新文献

{"title":"How Mathematical Economics Became (Simply) Economics: The Mathematical Training of Economists during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in the United States","authors":"Camila Orozco Espinel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3731733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3731733","url":null,"abstract":"Before the use of mathematics in economics was generalized, mathematical and nonmathematically trained economist lived together. This paper studies this period of cohabitation. By focusing on the communication challenges between these two groups during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a watershed moment, this paper analyzes the entrance of mathematics into economists’ training. The paper explores the development of teaching materials specific for the mathematical training of social scientists, the entrance of mathematics to the economics curriculum, and the role of the Social Science Research Council in this delivered process. All these elements are integral to understand how the mathematical methods and tools introduced by a small group of economists during the mid-twentieth century came to be adopted by the entire discipline within a couple of decades and thus effected a permanent transformation of economics.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122596981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Applied Theory of the Bourgeois Era: A Price-Theoretic Perspective","authors":"Peter J. Boettke, Rosolino A. Candela","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3729662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3729662","url":null,"abstract":"What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are not merely a “bundle of sticks,” in that private property rights make exchange possible, but a culture of liberal ideas makes exchange viable. Third, ideas conducive to liberalism give rise to generalized increasing returns to the scope, rather than scale, of market exchange, which generated the Great Enrichment.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124333110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"David Hume, Economic Rationality, and Policy: Symposium Introduction","authors":"Erik W. Matson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3729397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3729397","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This is an introduction to the symposium, \"David Hume, Economic Rationality, and Policy.\" Topics treated in the symposium include the idea of true preferences; Hume's theory of preferences in relation to his economic philosophy; justice and markets as a joint coordination regime; the instability of general, inflexible rules; conservatism and liberalism; the ethics of policy innovation; Hume and classical economics; group analytics and contemporary political sociology.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134512761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Anatomy and Price of an Ideational Conquest: On Steady Stifling of Academe Since the World War II","authors":"A. Maharatna","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3726465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3726465","url":null,"abstract":"The object of the monograph is two-fold: a) to discern directions of ideational changes and policy evolution pertaining to notions, functions, and financing of ‘higher education’ (HE) through a critical evaluation of reports/reviews/books/recommendations of a series of landmark committees/commissions/panels/ideologues especially in UK and USA since WWII; b) to assess the corresponding effects of these ideational (and policy) changes (or conquest) on academic standard/quality as well as overall societal contributions of HE. It is shown that a stark neoliberal policy regime has been established across world both via new theoretical (and ideational) constructs/formulations (mainly) by mainstream (neoclassical) economics profession with an active benefaction of the Bretton Woods institutions and other multilateral agencies. But these pro-market ideas/ideology and reforms in the sphere of HE/university (including privatization) are found to have set off – not surprisingly at all – fairly robust temporal (and global) trends of falling academic standard, rigors, and intellectual contributions/capabilities along with rapid growth of HE both as an industry and prospective propellent of foreign trade and profit. The monograph concludes that it is high time that the global leaders rethink about the future of HE as an academe.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132087263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Mathematical Mistakes of Neoclassical Theory and its Reformation","authors":"D. Nomidis","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3694459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3694459","url":null,"abstract":"This paper completes my previous paper \"A Revision of the Theory of Perfect Competition and of Value\" with a more global analysis of the mathematical mistakes of the neoclassical theory. During the second half of the twentieth century Microeconomic theory moved increasingly away from price theory, which was gradually displaced by more modern trends such as game theory, behavioral-empirical-experimental economics, industrial organization, neuroeconomics, heterodox economics, etc. This was due to serious shortcomings and (mathematical) mistakes of the traditional theory that is based on Neoclassical economics. The most obvious of those mistakes is that the equilibrium point does not maximize the profits of firms, as they are maximized at the intersection of total supply (marginal cost according to neoclassicals) with the marginal revenue from the total demand and not with the total demand itself as neoclassicals argue. The correction of those mistakes entails dramatic changes in the Neoclassical theory and its fundamental outcomes, concerning perfect competition, price determination, value theory, income distribution, social welfare, and other major fields of economics. This reformation results also in an integrated theory in which market works, regardless of the number of firms, i.e. from monopoly to perfect competition. But most importantly, by this reformation traditional price theory regains its self-efficiency, prestige, and dominant position in economics.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"15 15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127668834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Schumpeterian Enigmas","authors":"David Glasner","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3693515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3693515","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Drawing on McCraw’s (2007) biography, this paper assesses the character of Joseph Schumpeter. After a biographical summary of Schumpeter’s life and career as an economist, the paper considers a thread of deliberate posturing and pretense in Schumpeter’s grandiose ambitions and claims about himself. It also takes account of his ambiguous political and moral stance in both his personal, public and scholarly lives, in particular his tenure as finance minister in the short-lived German Socialist government after World War I and his famous prediction of the ultimate demise of capitalism in his celebrated Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Although he emigrated to the US in the 1930s Schumpeter was suspected of harboring pro-German or even pro-Nazi sympathies during World War II, sympathies that are at least partially confirmed by the letters and papers discussed at length by McCraw. Moreover, despite Schumpeter’s support for his student Paul Samuelson, when Samuelson, owing to anti-Semitic prejudice, was rejected for a permanent appointment at Harvard, Samuelson himself judged Schumpeter to have been antisemitic. Nevertheless, despite his character flaws, Schumpeter exhibited a generosity of spirit in his assessments of the work of other economists in his last and greatest work The History of Economic Analysis, a work also exhibiting uncharacteristic self-effacement by its author. That self-effacement may be-attributable to Schumpeter’s own tragic and largely unrealized ambition to achieve the technical analytical breakthroughs to which he accorded highest honors in his assessments of the work of other economists, notably, Quesnay, Cournot and Walras.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133946410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting the History of Welfare Economics","authors":"Gate Working Paper Series, R. Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard, Tamotsu Nishizawa","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3692494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3692494","url":null,"abstract":"Our forthcoming book, Welfare Theory, Public Action and Ethical Values challenges the belief that, until modern welfare economics introduced issues such as justice, freedom and equality, economists adopted what Amartya Sen called \"welfarism.\" This is the belief that the welfare of society depends solely on the ordinal utilities of the individuals making up the society. Containing chapters on some of the leading twentieth-century economists, including Walras, Marshall, Pigou, Pareto, Samuelson, Musgrave, Hicks, Arrow, Coase and Sen, as well as lesser-known figures, including Ruskin, Hobson and contributors to the literature on capabilities, the book argues that, whatever their theoretical commitments, when economists have considered practical problems they have adopted a wider range of ethical values, attaching weight to equality, justice and freedom. Part 1 explains the concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism and explores ways in which economists have departed from welfarism when tackling practical problems and public policy. Part 2 explores the reasons for this. When moving away from abstract theories to consider practical problems it is often hard not to take an ethical position and economists have often been willing to do so. We conclude that economics needs to recognise this and to become more of a moral science.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134374107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Joan Robinson’s Role in Creating the Myth That R. Kahn Originated the Multiplier Concept","authors":"M. E. Brady","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3690281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3690281","url":null,"abstract":"An enduring myth accepted by all Orthodox and heterodox economists is that it was Richard Kahn who discovered and originated the concept of the multiplier. Kahn then supposedly showed Keynes how the multiplier concept could be specified mathematically so as to provide hard support for Keynes’s views in the late 1920’s about increased initial government spending on public infrastructure generating much larger increases in total spending than the original injection, leading to decreasing levels of unemployment. \u0000 \u0000There are three major problems with this story. \u0000 \u0000First, Kahn, himself, in a 1936 response to Hans Neisser in the Review of Economics and Statistics stated that most of his ideas about the multiplier concept came from Keynes. \u0000 \u0000Second,the mathematical and logical development of the multiplier concept had already been formalized and formulated precisely by Keynes in 1921 on p. 315 in footnote 1 of the A Treatise on Probability in section 8 of chapter 26. \u0000 \u0000Third, Keynes provided an arithmetic example of the mathematical technique worked out in the A Treatise on Probability in May,1929. \u0000 \u0000There is simply no foundation for the myth, promoted by Joan Robinson, that Kahn was the author of the multiplier concept. Kahn went along with Robinson because he was involved in a 54 year old relationship with Joan Robinson. \u0000 \u0000Keynes taught Kahn the theory of the multiplier concept and left it up to Kahn to write a full blown article on it, which was then published by Keynes in the June,1931 issue of the Economic Journal.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114557915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Joan Robinson Was the First Bastard Keynesian: There Is No ‘Perhaps’","authors":"M. E. Brady","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3689765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3689765","url":null,"abstract":"Joan Robinson was the first Bastard Keynesian. There is no “…perhaps…”(Aslanbeigui & Oakes, 2009, p.219) at all involved in that conclusion. The conflict between J M Keynes and J. Robinson was fundamental and basic. Keynes did not believe that his models and theories were true, since no theory or model can be true, given that models and theories are, at best, approximations of reality. Any scientist, either physical, life, behavioral or social, who believes that his theories and models are true, is a pseudo scientist at best and probably holds anti scientific views. This characterization is especially apropos when considering orthodox and heterodox economists, who believe that their models and theories are true. \u0000 \u0000Keynes believed that his models (multiplier, D-Z, IS-LM (LP), interval valued probability, inexact measurement, weight of the argument) were better, more reliable, more general and more useful than the Classical (excluding Adam Smith, who was never a classical economist) and Neoclassical models and theories because they allowed one to explain far more about what was actually happening in the real world (reality). \u0000 \u0000Robinson, on the other hand, did not understand what models and theories are, since she thought that equilibrium models that conflicted with history had to be false. For Keynes, models and theories are not true and false. Some are better than others. For Robinson, models are either true or false, in much the same way that rational expectationists believe that their hypothesis is true: This was not Robinson’s conception of The General Theory. Unlike other work in economics, it should be read sub species aeternitatis. Keynes had discovered a body of economic truths that could be applied to resolve economic problems and provide the basis for a new pedagogy. Robinson had no doubts about what these truths were and how they should be understood. Doubts were inconsistent with her agenda. They would forestall her plan to indoctrinate beginning students, “uncontaminated” by training in economics. They would also compromise her own Keynesian research program.... These uncertainties dictated a commitment to the solidity of The General Theory. As regards fundamentals, Robinson wrote confidently that “we know near enough where we are” (in Keynes 1973b, 149). Confirmation of basic Keynesian truths did not depend on the controversy produced by a general conflagration in economics. These truths were revealed hermetically through personal contact with the master and his intimates. The qualification for understanding The General Theory was not participation in a disciplinary dialogue but membership in a charismatic (sic) set of the chosen, the privileged experience of being one of the Cambridge illuminati—“we happy few in Cambridge . . . we and Maynard,” as Robert Solow characterized the gnostic ethos of Keynes disciples…” (Aslanbeigui & Oakes, 2009, pp.224-225). \u0000 \u0000Of course, Keynes NEVER believed at any time in his life that he had discove","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131407925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Many Faces of Unification and Pluralism in Economics: The Case of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis.","authors":"D. W. Hands","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3688705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3688705","url":null,"abstract":"The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded off against less of the other. This paper will use the example of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) to argue that the relationship between pluralism and unification is often more complex than this simple dichotomy suggests. In particular, Samuelson's Foundations is invariably presented as a key text in the unification of modern economics during the middle of the twentieth century; and in many ways that is entirely correct. But Samuelson's unification was not at the theoretical (causal and explanatory) level, but rather at the purely mathematical derivational level. Although this fact is recognized in the literature on Samuelson, what seems to be less recognized is that for Samuelson, much of the motivation for this unification was pluralist in spirit: not to narrow scientific economics into one single theory, but rather to allow for more than one theory to co-exist under a single unified derivational technique. This hidden pluralism will be discussed in detail. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for more recent developments in economics.","PeriodicalId":253619,"journal":{"name":"History of Economics eJournal","volume":"332 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115976564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}