When I was contemplating a topic for my PhD thesis, it struck me powerfully that American economics was severely under-studied, and that this applied even more so to those associated with “American institutional economics.” My research soon indicated to me that the literature that did exist was lacking in coverage and badly misleading. During my research in archives, I uncovered some real gems—just one example was the archives of the Robert Bookings Graduate School, an institution largely forgotten, but famous at the time. This was exciting and inspired me to continue on to provide a major re-evaluation of American economics in the interwar period.
I wrote
The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947: Science and Social Control
American economics in the Progressive Era (usually dated from the later 1800s to World War I) is quite fascinating.
Mary Furner’s book is an excellent discussion of the developing American social sciences in this period.
American universities developed rapidly along with the professionalization of the social sciences. At the same time, rapid US industrialization created a raft of new economic and social problems that demanded a response.
This created a tension between the desire for professional “scientific” standing and the demand to respond to obvious social problems by advocating for particular policy responses.
Furner pays particular attention to the work and career of economist H. C. Adams, who was a teacher to a number of the later institutionalist group. In the institutionalist literature, this tension is expressed in the conjoined goals of “science and social control.”
For institutionalists, the solution to this problem was found in the pragmatic and instrumental philosophy of science developed by John Dewey.
This award-winning book of the Frederick Jackson Turner Studies describes the early development of social science professions in the United States. Furner traces the academic process in economics, sociology, and political science. She devotes considerable attention to economics in the 1880s, when first-generation professionals wrestled with the enormously difficult social questions associated with industrialization. Controversies among economists reflected an endemic tension in social science between the necessity of being recognized as objective scientists and an intense desire to advocate reforms.
Molded by internal conflicts and external pressures, social science gradually changed. In the 1890s economics was defined more narrowly around…
Mary Furner’s book presents what is the common view of progressives as liberal reformers, but there is another side to progressive social science that is less liberal.
The progressive era social science literature is replete with racism and with arguments about racial and other forms of inferiority derived from eugenics.
The vast amount of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe gave rise to concerns about the undermining of American standards, both biological and economic, including theories of “race suicide.”
Leonard’s book has generated a great deal of discussion, and while there is no doubt that many progressives displayed eugenic and racist ideas, it needs to be stressed that such views were not limited to progressives, but included many of those with conservative and even free-market views in other areas.
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
It is not often recognized just how significant the Rockefeller Foundation, and especially the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation (LSRM), was to the development of Economics in the United States.
The story is quite extraordinary, starting with the appointment of a very young Beardsley Ruml to head up the LSRM, who led the way by funding economic programs and research institutes (University of Chicago, Social Science Research Council, Brookings, National Bureau of Economic Research), with a particular emphasis on work that was empirical and aimed at social improvement and the solution of social problems.
Ruml shared the philosophy of “science and social control” that was so central to the institutionalist movement.
Making use of untapped resources, Seim looks at the impact of the Rockefellers, viewed through the lens of their philanthropic support of social science from 1890-1940. Focusing specifically on the Rockefeller Foundation and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, Seim connects the family's business success with its philanthropic enterprises.
This book provides an excellent discussion of the various policy debates and conflicts that occurred within the New Deal, involving monetary policy, the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as well as many other programs.
Key to this was the shift away from “planning” and towards the greater use of fiscal policy and anti-trust that occurred after 1935 as the result of Supreme Court decisions.
Institutionalists played a major role in all parts of the New Deal, but policies were often rather experimental.
As various ideas were tried and discarded (for both economic and legal reasons), policy eventually arrived at an Americanized version of Keynesianism.
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…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
For myself, one of the most remarkable and fascinating aspects of the recent history of economics has been the resurgence of free-market advocacy opposed to the more interventionist institutionalist and Keynesian policy ideas that dominated economics from the New Deal on through to the post-World War II period.
Burgin’s excellent book charts this revival of pro-market thinking, focusing particularly on F. A. Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Chicago School of Economics, and gives an especially important role to Milton Friedman whose work was to influence both Reagan and Thatcher.
Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasionis an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.
Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947…
Institutionalism has previously been seen only as a marginal tradition of dissent from more orthodox economics. My argument is that in the interwar period institutionalism was a very significant part of the mainstream of American economics, well represented at major universities and in leading journals, associated with novel educational programs and research institutes, well connected to major funding agencies, and actively involved in important economic reform efforts, including the New Deal. Institutionalism embodied a desire for greater regulation of business activity together with a strong commitment to empirical methods: expressed in their ideals of “science” and “social control.” The movement took off from the work of American progressive economists in the period from 1880-1918, reached a peak in the inter-war period, but then declined in significance after World War II.
