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This volume, which is part of a series edited by Robert Cord, has the stated aim of examining the transformation of economics that has taken place since the Second World War by recruiting a mixture...

This volume contains a small sample of papers presented to the fiftieth UK History of Economic Thought Conference, held at Balliol College, Oxford, on 29–31 August 2018. Over forty papers were presented, and this special issue contains nine of the thirty-one submitted for possible publication.

Frank Hahn was both a Keynesian economist, active in policy debates, and an economic theorist. Placing his work in the context of attempts to make theoretical sense of Keynesian economics, this article explores the way Hahn used abstract general equilibrium theory to draw conclusions relevant to policy in an ‘imperfect’ world that does not conform to the assumptions made in the theory. Hahn’s rigorous approach to theorizing as the route to understanding is assessed in relation to the different approaches of Robert Lucas, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and Axel Leijonhufvud.

This innovative history of welfare economics challenges the view that welfare economics can be discussed without taking ethical values into account. Whatever their theoretical commitments, when economists have considered practical problems relating to public policy, they have adopted a wider range of ethical values, whether equality, justice, freedom, or democracy. Even canonical authors in the history of welfare economics are shown to have adopted ethical positions different from those with which they are commonly associated. Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values explores the reasons and implications of this, drawing on concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism developed in modern welfare economics. The authors exemplify how economic theory, public affairs and political philosophy interact, challenging the status quo in order to push economists and historians to reconsider the nature and meaning of welfare economics.

Using the FMP model as an example, this article examines the practices of macroeconometric modelers around 1970. It is argued that, for all the criticism such methods have received, they represented conscious choices made because modelers had objectives and criteria that were different from those of later critics. For example, where critics saw a lack of theoretical consistency, modelers saw and valued flexibility.

Paul Samuelson is renowned as a debunker of Alfred Marshall. This chapter reviews his assessments of Marshall. It concludes that, although the conventional view is correct, it is important also to recognise that Samuelson considered Marshall to have been a great economist, albeit one who could have been even greater.

An awareness of language matters to a discipline because claims to knowledge can be made only by using language. The importance of language to philosophy is clear: much of twentieth-century philosophy has been concerned with language. The role of language has, generally, not been seen by economists as raising any significant issues. Economic methodologists have, therefore, focused on issues such as falsifi-cationism and empirical testing, not on the way in which meanings are negotiated. The pervasiveness of problems to do with language means that the problem of language has been approached from many different perspectives. In applied linguistics two approaches are of interest: discourse analysis and genre analysis. Discourse analysis aims at establishing patterns of organization of text at a level above that of the sentence; genre analysis applies this basic approach to the analysis of particular genres such as the journal article.

Alvin Harvey Hansen (1887-1975) was a business cycle theorist who, in the late 1930s, became one of the leading exponents of Keynesian thinking, seeing the Keynes’s multiplier as providing a missing link in his earlier, dynamic theory of the cycle. After moving from Minnesota to Harvard in 1937, together with John Williams, he ran the Fiscal Policy Seminar, which was an important forum in which young economists debated Keynesian ideas. His Guide to Keynes offered the canonical statement of what became known as the IS-LM model.

Taken together, these two books raise the question of how one should approach writing a short introduction to the history of economic thought. Should one try to cover almost everything or focus on ...

Paul Samuelson’s widely quoted deprecatory remarks about female economists are discussed in the context of his having been one of the earliest economists to emphasize the problem of gender and racial discrimination in his textbook. Reference is made both to his published analyses of discrimination, in his textbook and elsewhere, and to archival materials on his interactions with female economists, including testimonials he wrote on their behalf. His attitudes appear paradoxical in that he emphasized the problem of discrimination and was very supportive of women but this did not lead him to challenge some of the attitudes he held about women in general.

It is widely accepted that economics has changed significantly since the 1970s with the development of new data sources, new methods of analysis and the computer. This paper argues that this transformation of the discipline involves more than just a rise of empirical work: it involves a new understanding of the relationship between theoretical and applied work, which raised the prestige of the latter. The meaning of economic theory and applied work and the boundaries between them changed as theory and empirical work alike became more applied in the sense that they were brought to bear on specific social issues, often with a policy orientation. Drawing on an analysis of John Bates Clark medal winners and on papers published in a special volume of History of Political Economy, to which which this is an introduction, we then discuss reasons for this transformation. It resulted from new modeling strategies, data sets and technologies as as well as the changing influence of public and private patrons.

This essay investigates a hitherto-unexamined collaboration between two of the founders of modern history of science, Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, and two economists, Paul Samuelson and Rupert Maclaurin. The arena in which these two disciplines came together was the Bowman Committee, one of the committees that prepared material for Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier. The essay shows how their collaboration helped to shape the committee’s recommendations, in which different models of science confronted each other. It then shows how, despite this success, the basis for long-term collaboration of economists and historians of science disappeared, because the resulting linear model of science and technology separated the study of scientific and economic progress into noncommunicating boxes .

This article traces some of the historical roots of current debates about secular economic stagnation, involving L. Summers, R. Gordon, and others. We focus on early contributions by Alvin Hansen and John A. Hobson. Although Hansen has been the main influence on the secular stagnation literature, Hobson’s suggested link between economic inequality and stagnation is of interest in view of T. Piketty’s recent claim about the connection between slower growth and inequality. E. Domar and P. Samuelson, Hansen’s students at Harvard, elaborated economic growth and multiplier-accelerator models as follow-ups to Hansen’s original treatment. Domar called attention to Hobson’s insight about underconsumption, increasing capacity, and deficient aggregate demand. We conclude that the range of positions held today concerning stagnation and inequality is large, as it was earlier in the history of thought.

This article traces the attempts of W. Rupert Maclaurin to improve the research profile of economics at MIT through establishing a research project on the economics of innovation, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The project is important because it marks a significant stage in the transition of economics at MIT from being a department focused exclusively on providing courses for engineers and scientists to one that was to become a major location for research in economics. Through examination of papers held in the Rockefeller archives it documents the difficulties Maclaurin encountered and the failure of the project to draw on the resources of MIT's scientists and engineers in the way he and Rockefeller officials had hoped and reflects on his marginalization in a department increasingly dominated by Paul Samuelson. Maclaurin's interdisciplinary approach to research fell out of favor, and the research profile of the MIT economics department became increasingly monodisciplinary.

The paper presents a history of the concept of “secular stagnation”, from Alvin Hansen in the 1930s and 1940s to its recent revival by Larry Summers. We examine Hansen's ideas and those of young economists associated with him, notably Evsey Domar, Everett Hagen, Benjamin Higgins, Alan Sweezy, and Paul Samuelson, who were the economists who kept the doctrine alive in the 1950s and to whom Summers and others taking up the idea recently turned. Their ideas are contrasted with the theories of stagnation associated with Josef Steindl and Joseph Schumpeter. It is a label for a historical thesis about the American economy, which, initially seen as distinct from Keynes General Theory, came to be seen as a theoretical proposition based on Keynesian theory. It is argued that the idea of secular stagnation had a political dimension, connected to the New Deal and the Cold War and changing conceptions of economic maturity.

This paper discusses the transition from a perspective in which the determination of income, output, and unemployment was seen as a part of the theory of the business cycle to one in which they are determined independently of the cycle, a transition that meant that the theory of output came to be more sharply separated from the theory of growth. In place of theories of the business cycle, which were rooted in structural changes associated with growth, business cycle theory came to be more of an adjunct to short-run theories. Whereas Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Maynard Keynes were already arguing in terms of the short run by the early 1930s, some American economists continued to think in terms of the business cycle until the very end of the 1930s. This paper shows that for Alvin Hansen and Paul Samuelson, both highly influential figures in postwar economics, the shift came about only because of the need to adduce structural factors to explain the recession of 1937–38 and wartime experience. The focus on income determination as the central macroeconomic problem in Samuelson’s textbook reflected the change in thinking that had happened during the 1940s.

In the early 1930s American economists widely attributed the catastrophe of the Great Depression to concentration of income and wealth and the consequent concentration of market power, which interfered with the proper working of markets. Alongside this, there developed another theory of market failure in which depression stemmed from the failure of the financial machine to translate saving into investment. The article explores how these two views of market failure came together in the proceedings of the Temporary National Economic Committee, arguing that the ideas about markets found there were important for postwar work on both industrial organization and the theory of employment.

The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas, Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in which the messiness for which such models were later criticized was endorsed as providing enabling modelers to be guided by data and as offering the flexibility needed to undertake policy analysis and to analyze the consequences of events. Practices that critics considered fatal weaknesses, such as intercept adjustments or fudging, were what clients were what clients paid for as the macroeconometric modeling industry went private.

This paper offers a historical perspective on economists’ treatment of women, through exploring the case of Paul Samuelson. Some of his remarks about women in the economy and in economics were famously considered deprecatory. We place them in the context of the discussions of discrimination in his textbook, Economics, and his interactions with female students and colleagues. Drawing on correspondence as well as published work, the paper reveals a complex set of attitudes: Samuelson recognized very early that women were held back by discrimination and wrote about it with a depth not seen in other textbooks. But his experience and support of women he knew did not mitigate some of the prejudices he held about women in general. It was when challenged over some of his statements that he apologized and adopted a more reflexive stance.

Born in the Polish city of Łodź in 1899, the son of a small Jewish textile manufacturer, Michal Kalecki’s early years were spent in comfort in a cosmopolitan city. However, economic difficulties we...

Responding to the claims Keynes made in his “General Theory”, economists debated whether Keynesian economics or classical economics was more general. This paper argues the concept of generality underlying most of this literature differs from that underlying the neoclassical synthesis proposed by Paul Samuelson in “Economics”, and that this in turn differed from the notion of generality found in his “Foundations of Economic Analysis”. No fewer than three ideas of what it means to have a general theory are involved.