Economists and Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century.

• Author: Colander, David

In the 1980s a group of economists organized a research project on the institutionalization of political economy in the United States, Japan, Britain, and continental Europe. Economists and Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, edited by William Barber, is the U.S. contribution to that project. It is a slightly revised paperback edition of Barber's edited Breaking the Academic Mold (Wesleyan University Press, 1988). Economists and Higher Learning consists of twelve essays recounting the beginnings of most of the top U.S. academic economics departments, and two broader essays - one an introduction by Barber and the other a general essay by Bob Coats on the professionalization of American economics. All are well written, informative, and insightful.

The stories of the individual departments are fun reading for any economist, but especially for those associated with the schools that are discussed: the University of Virginia, South Carolina College, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Chicago, The University of California and Stanford, MIT, and Wisconsin. The stories the contributors tell are based on archival documents and give one a sense of what interesting people economists were (and are). Each department has a slightly different, fascinating, story. These are stories of intrigue, of bias, of personalities, and of money. We see raids by departments, such as that by the University of Chicago on Clark's economic department; we see strategic bargaining gone wrong, such as Richard Ely's attempt to squeeze an extra $1,000 out of the University of Chicago (the result: the appointment of Lawrence Laughlin to head the new Chicago department and the subsequent creation of the Chicago economics tradition in Laughlin's image). We see political persecution - economists vilified for their unorthodox views. The whole thing is a veritable soap opera.

Reading these essays made me realize how Anglicized our history of thought presentations (including mine) have become. Before reading this book, I had somehow always pictured studying economics in the 19th century, even in the United States, as studying well known British books. The collective story told by the contributors to this volume is one of students studying Americanized "textbooks" in which the views of the master were presented and contrasted with those of well known British writers. This American economics differed substantially from British economics. For example, a number of...