This book tells the extraordinary story of the Pinochet regime's economists, known as the Chicago Boys. It explores the roots of their ideas and their sense of mission, following their training as economists at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. After their return to Chile, the Chicago Boys took advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the 1973 military coup to launch the first radical free market strategy implemented in a developing country. The ideological strength of their mission and the military authoritarianism of General Pinochet combined to transform an economy that, following the return to democracy, has stabilized and is seen as a model for Latin America. This book, written by a political scientist, examines the neo-liberal economists and their perspective on the market. It also narrates the history of the transfer of ideas from the industrialized world to a developing country, which will be of particular interest to economists.
This book provides a comprehensive survey of the major developments in monetary theory and policy from David Hume and Adam Smith to Walter Bagehot and Knut Wicksell. In particular, it seeks to explain why it took so long for a theory of central banking to penetrate mainstream thought. The book investigates how major monetary theorists understood the roles of the invisible and visible hands in money, credit and banking; what they thought about rules and discretion and the role played by commodity-money in their conceptualizations; whether or not they distinguished between the two different roles carried out via the financial system - making payments efficiently within the exchange process and facilitating intermediation in the capital market; how they perceived the influence of the monetary system on macroeconomic aggregates such as the price level, output and accumulation of wealth; and finally, what they thought about monetary policy.
This book presents a history of behavioral economics. The recurring theme is that behavioral economics reflects and contributes to a fundamental reorientation of the epistemological foundations upon which economics had been based since the days of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. With behavioral economics, the discipline has shifted from grounding its theories in generalized characterizations to building theories from behavioral assumptions directly amenable to empirical validation and refutation. The book proceeds chronologically and takes the reader from von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms of rational behavior, through the incorporation of rational decision theory in psychology in the 1950s–70s, to the creation and rise of behavioral economics in the 1980s and 1990s at the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.
This book tells the story of the search for disequilibrium micro-foundations for macroeconomic theory, from the disequilibrium theories of Patinkin, Clower and Leijonhufvud to recent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with imperfect competition. Placing this search against the background of wider developments in macroeconomics, the authors contend that this was never a single research program, but involved economists with very different aims who developed the basic ideas about quantity constraints, spillover effects and coordination failures in different ways. The authors contrast this with the equilibrium, market-clearing approach of Phelps and Lucas, arguing that equilibrium theories simply assumed away the problems that had motivated the disequilibrium literature. Although market-clearing models came to dominate macroeconomics, disequilibrium theories never went away and continue to exert an important influence on the subject. Although this book focuses onone strand in
As one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, Paul Anthony Samuelson revolutionized many branches of economic theory. As a diligent student of his predecessors, he reconstructed their economic analyses in the mathematical idiom he pioneered. Out of Samuelson's more than eighty articles, essays, and memoirs, the editors of this collection have selected seventeen. Twelve are mathematical reconstructions of some of the most famous work in the history of economic thought - work by David Hume, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and others. One is a methodological essay defending the Whig history that he was sometimes accused of promulgating; two deal with the achievements of Joseph Schumpeter and Denis Robertson; and two review theoretical developments of his own time: Keynesian economics and monopolistic competition. The collection provides readers with a sense of the depth and breadth of Samuelson's contributions to the study of the history of economics.
This book rejects the commonly encountered perception of Friedrich Engels as perpetuator of a 'tragic deception' of Marx, and the equally persistent body of opinion treating him as 'his master's voice'. Engels' claim to recognition is reinforced by an exceptional contribution in the 1840s to the very foundations of the Marxian enterprise, a contribution entailing not only the 'vision' but some of the building blocks in the working out of that vision. Subsequently, he proved himself to be a sophisticated interpreter of the doctrine of historical materialism and an important contributor in his own right. This volume serves as a companion to Samuel Hollander's The Economics of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
This book provides a detailed picture of the institutionalist movement in American economics concentrating on the period between the two World Wars. The discussion brings a new emphasis on the leading role of Walton Hamilton in the formation of institutionalism, on the special importance of the ideals of 'science' and 'social control' embodied within the movement, on the large and close network of individuals involved, on the educational programs and research organizations created by institutionalists and on the significant place of the movement within the mainstream of interwar American economics. In these ways the book focuses on the group most closely involved in the active promotion of the movement, on how they themselves constructed it, on its original intellectual appeal and promise and on its institutional supports and sources of funding.
The outline of modern macroeconomics took shape in Britain in the early nineteenth century thanks, in part, to David Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of the time. Britain was challenged by monetary inflation, industrial unemployment and the loss of jobs abroad. Ricardo pointed the way forward. As a financier and Member of Parliament, he was well versed in politics and commercial affairs. His expertise is shown by the practicality of his proposals, including the resumption of the gold standard, which was essential given the destabilizing policy of the Bank of England. Ricardo's expertise appears also in his debate with T. R. Malthus about whether an industrial economy can suffer a prolonged depression. Say's Law of Markets and the Quantity Theory of Money figure prominently in his works, but not in an extreme form. He was instead a subtle theorist, recognizing the non-neutrality of money, trade depressions and unemployment.
Focusing on the period of Milton Friedman's collaboration with Anna J. Schwartz, from 1948 to 1991, this 1996 work examines the history of debates between Friedman and his critics over money's causal role in business cycles. Professor Hammond shows that critics' reactions were grounded in two distinctive features of Friedman and Schwartz's way of doing economic analysis - their National Bureau business cycle methods and Friedman's Marshallian methodology. With the post-war dominance of Cowles Commission methods and Walrasian methodology, Friedman and Schwartz's monetary economics appeared to contemporary critics to be 'measurement without theory'. Drawing extensively upon unpublished materials, Professor Hammond's treatment offers new insights on Milton Friedman's attempts to settle debates with his critics and his eventual recognition of the methodological impediments. The book will interest monetary economists and macroeconomists, as well as historians of economics and
This 1988 book presents a historical investigation of the theoretical development of contemporary Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT). The author examines the central features of the EBCT by tracing both the history of business cycle theory and the history of econometrics. These historical analyses make clear two central principles of the EBCT: its optimization foundation and its economic strategy. Following along these lines, the author argues that the EBCT succeeds the tradition of the Austrian cycle theory that attempted to incorporate the cycle with classical equilibrium doctrine. He further argues that the EBCT's econometric strategy is only a child of the Cowles commission method. Investigating interwar macroeconomics in very readable style, this book brings the period back into the heart of macroeconomic thinking.
Inspired by recent developments in science studies, this book offers an innovative type of analysis of the recent history of rational expectations economics. In the course of exploring the multiple dimensions of rational expectations analysis, Professor Sent focuses on the work of Thomas Sargent, an instrumental pioneer in the development of this school of thought. The investigation attempts to avoid a Whiggish history that sees Sargent's development as inevitably progressing to better and better economic analysis. Instead, it provides an illustration of what happened to the approach through a contextualization of Sargent's work vis-á-vis that of other scholars and ideas. The treatment aims to illuminate some of the shifting negotiations and alliances that characterize the rise and shift of direction in rational expectations economics. The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations won the 1998 Gunnar Myrdal Prize of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for
This book covers a broad range of topics in the history of economics that have relevance to economic theories. The author believes that one of the tasks for a historian of economics is to analyze and interpret theories currently outside the mainstream of economic theory, in this case non-Walrasian economics. By doing so, he argues, new directions and new areas for research can be developed that will extend the current theories. Familiar topics covered include: the division of labor, economies of scale, wages, profit, international trade, market mechanisms, and money. These are considered in the light of the well-known non-Walrasian schools of thought: the classical, Marxian, Austrian, and Cambridge schools.
This book covers a broad range of topics in the history of economics that have relevance to economic theories. The author believes that one of the tasks for a historian of economics is to analyze and interpret theories currently outside the mainstream of economic theory, in this case non-Walrasian economics. By doing so, he argues, new directions and new areas for research can be developed that will extend the current theories. Familiar topics covered include: the division of labor, economies of scale, wages, profit, international trade, market mechanisms, and money. These are considered in the light of the well-known non-Walrasian schools of thought: the classical, Marxian, Austrian, and Cambridge schools.
This book is a comprehensive investigation of the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), one of the great economists of the twentieth century. In this study, Yuichi Shionoya highlights Schumpeter's methodological views and emphasizes his ideal of a universal social science. Taking on board all aspects of his work, he reconstructs a system which encompasses theory (economic statics, economic dynamics, economic sociology) and metatheory (philosophy of science, history and sociology of science). The originality of Schumpeter's work - which the author calls the two-structure approach to the evolution of mind and society - is examined in the light of the intellectual field in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. This book is a major contribution to the history of economic thought.
This 1994 collection of interdisciplinary essays was the first to investigate how images in the history of the natural and physical sciences have been used to shape the history of economic thought. The contributors, historians of science and economics alike, document the extent to which scholars have drawn on physical and natural science to ground economic ideas and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors in the structure and content of economic thought. These range from Aristotle's discussion of the division of labour, to Marshall's evocation of population biology, to Hayek's dependence upon evolutionary concepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists' invocation of chaos theory. Resort to such images, contributors find, was more than mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, appeals to natural and physical metaphors serve to constitute the very subject matter of the discipline and what might be accepted as the 'economic'.
The Cobb-Douglas regression, a statistical technique developed to estimate what economists called a 'production function', was introduced in the late 1920s. For several years, only economist Paul Douglas and a few collaborators used the technique, while vigorously defending it against numerous critics. By the 1950s, however, several economists beyond Douglas's circle were using the technique, and by the 1970s, Douglas's regression, and more sophisticated procedures inspired by it, had become standard parts of the empirical economist's toolkit. This volume is the story of the Cobb-Douglas regression from its introduction to its acceptance as general-purpose research tool. The story intersects with the histories of several important empirical research programs in twentieth century economics, and vividly portrays the challenges of empirical economic research during that era. Fundamentally, this work represents a case study of how a controversial, innovative research tool comes to be
This book presents a history of behavioral economics. The recurring theme is that behavioral economics reflects and contributes to a fundamental reorientation of the epistemological foundations upon which economics had been based since the days of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. With behavioral economics, the discipline has shifted from grounding its theories in generalized characterizations to building theories from behavioral assumptions directly amenable to empirical validation and refutation. The book proceeds chronologically and takes the reader from von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms of rational behavior, through the incorporation of rational decision theory in psychology in the 1950s–70s, to the creation and rise of behavioral economics in the 1980s and 1990s at the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.
More than any of his predecessors in the White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt drew heavily on the thinking of economists as he sought to combat the Great Depression, to mobilize the American economy for war, and to chart a new order for the post-war world. Designs Within Disorder, published in 1996, is an inquiry into the way divergent analytic perspectives competed for official favour and the manner in which the President opted to pick and choose among them when formulating economic policies. During the Roosevelt years, two 'revolutions' were underway simultaneously. One of them involved a fundamental restructuring of the American economy and of the role government was to play in it. A second was an intellectual revolution which engaged economists in reconceptualizing the nature of their discipline. Most of the programmatic initiatives Roosevelt put in place displayed a remarkable staying power for over half a century.
This book examines and compares the two major traditions of institutionalist thinking in economics: the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, and the 'new' institutionalism developed more recently from neoclassical and Austrian sources and including the writings of Coase, Williamson, North, Schotter, and many others. The discussion is organized around a set of key methodological, theoretical, and normative problems that necessarily confront any attempt to incorporate institutions (defined to include organizations, laws, and social norms) into economics. These are identified in terms of the issues surrounding the use of formal or non-formal analytical methods, individualist or holistic approaches, the respective roles of rational choice and rule-following behavior, the relative importance of the spontaneous evolution and deliberative design of institutions, and questions concerning the normative appraisal of institutions. The old and the new institutionalism
