Suchergebnisse

In the late 1950s and early 1960s MIT economists, led by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, became involved in a long controversy with economists in Cambridge, England, led by Joan Robinson, Luigi Pasinetti, and Nicholas Kaldor, over the theory of capital. This article looks at that controversy from the perspective of MIT, trying to establish why Samuelson and Solow became so involved. It is argued that Robinson was challenging propositions about linear models and their relationship to models with smooth substitution, on which they had been working, in Samuelson's case, since the 1940s. The article then turns a by-product of the controversy—the model of short-run disequilibrium by Solow and Joseph Stiglitz—arguing that this marked a turning point in macroeconomics at MIT. Throughout it is argued that the close personal contacts between MIT economists and their Cambridge counterparts are important to understand how the debate evolved.

The article reconstructs the events surrounding Paul Samuelson's departure from Harvard to MIT in October 1940, a crucial event in the rise to prominence of MIT's economics department. The contrasting attitudes of Harvard and MIT to Jewish economists were just one of many factors. Samuelson was then considered a narrow specialist in mathematical economics, a field in which there were few openings, and MIT made an attractive offer that contrasted with the uncertain future he faced were he to remain at Harvard. Significance is attached to the vision of what he might achieve at MIT held out by his mentor, E. B. Wilson, who argued that economics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would be stronger if he moved to MIT and that Samuelson had not then achieved the mastery of general economics found in his later work.

The immediate postwar period witnessed not only a considerable expansion of economics graduate education in the United States but also its reformulation. Graduate education at MIT became more technical, with shorter theses on narrowly defined problems. This occurred as economics was going through important changes, informed by its mathematization, by the stabilization of a neoclassical way of doing economics, by the advancement of econometrics and the "Keynesian revolution," and by the Americanization of economics. The MIT PhD program in economics was created only in 1941 but very quickly became a major producer of PhDs. The new training offered by MIT to economists not only followed larger changes in US academe but also contributed to them, and this makes it an important case study of the transformation of American economics more generally. My aim here is to scrutinize the formative years of this graduate program, mostly the 1940s and 1950s.

MIT emerged from "nowhere" in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this article the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a collapse—in some places slower, in some places faster—of the barriers to the hiring of Jewish faculty in American colleges and universities. And more than any other elite private or public university, particularly Ivy League universities, MIT welcomed Jewish economists.

This article examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called the "middle of the road" to—seemingly—stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the 1940s to come over to Chicago, which Schultz persistently repeated over three years and despite strong Chicago faculty resistance. A contrast between Schultz's own experiences as an economic expert at Iowa State, Samuelson's work as an external consultant for the National Resources Planning Board during the Second World War, and the firm support of the MIT administration for Samuelson's research serves to pinpoint the meaning of being technical for Samuelson, and the relation of the technical economic expert to the realm of politics.

This article examines certain issues in postwar economic theory and compares them with related issues in the nascent fields of cybernetics, industrial dynamics, and operations research. Because all these fields had close connections to MIT, the comparison provides an opportunity to assess to what degree a peculiar MIT "style" of economics, developed particularly by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, could be attributed to the MIT context, and to what degree this style developed in dialogue with a larger conversation taking place in and around the American economic profession as a whole. It is concluded that there were significant affinities in theoretical interest running between MIT economics and other fields at MIT, which revolved around the emergence of macro-scale phenomena out of the dynamic interplay of local decision-making processes. However, the methodology through which Samuelson and Solow, in particular, addressed these issues was peculiar to economic discourse.

Modern disagreements about the question to what extent Richard Cantillon anticipated the classical theory of profit and interest are, at least to some extent, due to ambiguities in his writings. New insights into his thinking can be obtained from considering, besides the French Essai, relevant passages from the English versions of Cantillon's writings. Two kinds of development can be seen in his writings. The first kind of development, internal to each of the versions of his work, is due to the way in which Cantillon builds up his theories. Since he typically starts from a simple situation, the association of the income category "profit" with the function of the provision of capital is only made later in his work. The other development can be seen between the versions. While relevant passages in Philip Cantillon's Analysis of Trade offer less developed arguments than the Essai, formulations found in Malachy Postlethwayt's Universal Dictionary sometimes go beyond what we find in the French text. One passage in particular shows that Cantillon was in a sense groping toward a notion of profit as a return on capital that was closer to the classical conception.