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The Cost of Virtue: Some Hypotheses on How Tractability Shaped Economics
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Why Historians of Economics Should Tweet
In: History of political economy, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 615-621
ISSN: 1527-1919
Toward a History of Economics at Mit, 1940-72
In: History of political economy, Band 46, Heft suppl_1, S. 15-44
ISSN: 1527-1919
This article tells the development of economics at MIT between 1940 and 1972. The recruitment of Paul Samuelson in 1940 fostered the establishment of a small community of economists within an engineering institute that was itself undergoing major transformations. A "new economics" was then shaped during the fifties, one influenced by the demands of engineers, scientists, and business students, and somewhat eclipsed by the promising interdisciplinary research programs emerging in the newly founded Center for International Studies. During the sixties, MIT economists instantiated the vision of Samuelson and Robert Solow, worked to make their graduate program the most appealing in the country, and gained wide public visibility as policy-oriented scientists. Yet, beginning in the midsixties, MIT's apparently flourishing community was increasingly challenged, internally and externally. By the early seventies, the reforms implemented in reaction to these challenges had led to a normalization/standardization of its programs.
Shaky Foundations: The Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment series: Mark Solovey, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013, 266 pp., $39.95, ISBN 9780813554655
In: The European journal of the history of economic thought, Band 21, Heft 3, S. 537-541
ISSN: 1469-5936
Toward a History of Economics at MIT, 1940-1972
In: History of Political Economy, supplement to Volume 46, 2014, Forthcoming
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GUNNAR MYRDAL AND THE SCIENTIFIC WAY TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, 1914–1968
In: Journal of the history of economic thought, Band 31, Heft 1, S. 33-55
ISSN: 1469-9656
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AT THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM DURING THE 1960S
In: Journal of the history of economic thought, Band 43, Heft 3, S. 323-349
ISSN: 1469-9656
In this paper, we build on data on officials of the Federal Reserve System, oral history repositories, and hitherto underresearched archival sources to unpack the tortuous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. We show that growing attention to new macroeconomic research was a reaction to both mounting external criticisms against the Fed's decision-making process and the spread of new macroeconomic theories and econometric techniques. We argue that the rise of the number of PhD economists working at the Fed is a symptom rather than a cause of this transformation. Key to our story are a handful of economists from the Board of Governors' Division of Research and Statistics (DRS) who did not hold a PhD but envisioned their role as going beyond mere data accumulation and got involved in large-scale macroeconometric model building. We conclude that the divide between PhD and non-PhD economists may not be fully relevant to understand both the shift in the type of economics practiced at the Fed and the uses of this knowledge in the decision-making process. Equally important was the rift between different styles of economic analysis.
The Role of Seminars, Conferences and Workshops in the History of Economics
In: Revue d'Economie Politique, Forthcoming
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A Century of Economics and Engineering at Stanford
In: History of political economy, Band 52, Heft S1, S. 85-111
ISSN: 1527-1919
This article documents the disciplinary exchanges between economists and engineers at Stanford throughout the twentieth century. We outline the role of key scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Robert Wilson, as well as engineers turned administrators like Frederick Terman. We show that engineers drew upon economic theories of decision and allocation to improve practical industrial management decisions. Reciprocally, economists found in engineering the tools that they needed to rethink production and growth theory (including linear programming, optimal control theory, an epistemology of "application" that emphasized awareness to institutional details, trials and errors and experiments). By the 2000s, they had turned into economic engineers designing markets and other allocation mechanisms. These cross-disciplinary exchanges were mediated by Stanford's own institutional culture, notably its use of joint appointments, the development of multidisciplinary "programs" for students, the ability to attract a variety of visitors every year, the entrepreneurial and contract-oriented vision of its administrators, and the close ties with the industrial milieu that came to be called the Silicon Valley.
DEFINING EXCELLENCE: SEVENTY YEARS OF THE JOHN BATES CLARK MEDAL
In: Journal of the history of economic thought, Band 42, Heft 2, S. 153-176
ISSN: 1469-9656
Before the John Bates Clark Medal (JBCM) had become a widely acknowledged professional and public marker of excellence in economics research, in the first twenty years since its inception more than seventy years ago in 1947, it was almost discontinued three times and once even not conferred. These controversies derived from the fact that the medal was originally established to showcase the expertise of economists to other scientists, policy-makers, and the wider public. While earlier awards were given to theorists, in later years empirical and policy-oriented economists gained ground, reflecting how such research became more prestigious in economics. Based on a quantitative analysis of the forty medalists so far, we show that this empirical shift was concomitant with a decrease in the diversity and an increase in concentration of laureates: twenty-four or twenty-five out of forty awardees received their PhD degree or worked at Harvard, MIT, or Chicago at the time of being awarded.
Defining Excellence: Seventy Years of the John Bates Clark Medal
In: Forthcoming in the Journal for the History of Economic Thought
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