Talk:History of economic thought/Draft

Conversion to History of Economic thought

Having eliminated material that is irrelevant to the new subject heading, I propose to develop the opening section to cover changes of scope and methodology, and make major changes elsewhere, referring to the introduction of economic statistics and the development of inductive methodologies. I propose also to say much more about Keynesianism, monetarism and welfare economics. Any other suggestions?

Nick Gardner 02:38, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Revised opening paragraph

I have tried to avoid introducing too much economic terminology at this stage, preferring to concentrate upon the development of ideas. The reader is soon enough introduced to terms such as classical economics, Keynesian revolution etc, and there is a danger of going on too long and losing the reader's attention.

Does anyone disagree?

Nick Gardner 05:13, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Is that right about Ricardo?

I was surprised to read that Ricardo predicted a steady state of universal misery

Can someone, more familiar than I am with Ricardo's work, please advise me whether this is accurate - and if it is, whether it is central enough to his contribution to warrant inclusion here.

Nick Gardner 05:19, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Title

I've moved the article to history of modern economic thought from history of economic thought, modern. This is, I think, a much clearer and more felicitous phraseology--and it's consistent with our policy, moreover. --Larry Sanger 10:09, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Massive improvements

This is actually beginning to look like a respectable encyclopedia article!--Martin Baldwin-Edwards 10:32, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Thank you.

But having looked at it with an editorial, eye, I am sorry to say that I think further massive improvements will be needed before it could lay claim to acceptability, let alone respectability.

I will try to repair its omissions regarding, for example, general equilibrium, the circular flow of income and the methodological novelties in Keynesianism and monetarism. And I will consider adding references to some more recent developments such as increasing returns to scale.

This will take some time unless I get help!

Nick Gardner 02:00, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

Change of Title

The change of title is, I suggest, a mistake. Very few readers would consider eighteenth century thinking to be modern. The prominence given in the article to preclassical economics also seems to be misplaced. The material in that article, although of considerable academic interest, has little bearing upon subsequent developments.

I suggest moving the new opening sentence to a position immediately following the previous opening sentence and returning to the original title.

Nick Gardner 00:46, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I think I agree about the title: it is misleading. The old pages have to be deleted before the article can be moved there. Try your new opening, we can see how it looks. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 04:23, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I have re-worded the opening sentence. I leave to you the task of restoring the original title. OK? Nick Gardner 05:54, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

Please don't mind me.  :-) --Larry Sanger 09:11, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

Well, the renaming was done by you and Richard Jensen, but I think we need to have some agreement before renaming articles:-) --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 09:20, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

More history!

I've just noticed that there is a great deal more meticulously recorded history of thought in articles titled Neoclassical Schools and The Lausanne School. There is a good deal of overlapping (for example Walras is in all three). Also there is a plethora of links to unwritten articles on similar topics.

I am at a loss to know how to handle this. Should we retain all of it as it stands? Or should it all be integrated, somehow?

Looking further at the editing problem, I am having difficulty with the present catalogue-type presentation. I should much prefer to present the material as a readable dialogue, very briefly bringing out the clashes of ideas and the development of consensuses. But that would mean an almost complete rewrite - a daunting task. Although the idea intrigues me, I am inclined to doubt whether it deserves priority over the filling of the many other gaps in the CZ treatment of economics.

What do you think?

Nick Gardner 08:53, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

Yes, I noticed this mess the other day. It all needs to be integrated and rationalised. I am very late with some publishing and teaching obligations, so I need to get them out of the way before I help with this.

The priority of work needs to be decided. I suggest trying to fill in the page on the workgroup home, and hope that some other people will come along. You may add another category if you feel one is needed: this was just my preliminary atttempt to classify what is there and what is needed.

It is your own choice what you feel happiest doing:-) We are grateful to have an economist of your ability here and writing stuff! --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 09:25, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I've been working on cleanup, and adding references and important topics (I just added a section on institutionalists). This is an encyclopedia and we want to touch on all the important and influential ideas of the last 200 years. Many gaps remain (eg Keynes!). This is the survey article and it should not go in depth into any one topic. That is the function of specialized articles. The original article was "whiggish" history (that is the history of ideas the author considered important today), but that leaves out a great deal of economic thought that really mattered in its day.Richard Jensen 09:33, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I am inclined to leave the cleanup to you, Richard. You are obviously better qualified to do so than I am. However much is missing that is relevant to the current practice of the profession of economics, and some, I suspect, is poorly interpreted. I may come back with comments and contributions at a later stage. Nick Gardner 10:07, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I'm happy to do cleanup but we need you to add recent developments. Richard Jensen 10:25, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

OK. Nick Gardner 15:12, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

I realize parecon is not major, but a brief paragraph would seem worth a mention.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 15:56, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

What is parecon? Nick Gardner 16:30, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

Pareto? --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 16:36, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

superfluous links?

Doesn't it seem unrealistic to include such a large number of links? I should like to remove most of them - including most of the named personages - and replace some of the remainder with links to articles that we at present contemplate writing. Any objections? Nick Gardner 09:52, 16 October 2007 (CDT)

General Proposals for an Overhaul

This is a rough idea of how I would go about revising this article. Broadly speaking, I would try to replace the catalogue approach with an attempt to give a connected account of intellectual developments. In doing so I should want to adopt a very different account of the contributions of the people involved and the ideas that they developed.

• Among people mentioned whose contributions do not, in my view, merit a mention in a short article like this are:

Commons, Galbraith, Sombart, Stone, Burns, Greenspan, Weber, Becker, Kautsky, Hansen, Modigliani and Tobin.

• Among those that do not appear in the article but do, in my view, merit a mention are:

Mill, Hume, Lucas, Solow, Arrow, Krugman, Olsen, Pareto, Romer, Buchanan and the economists of the Austrian School.

• Among concepts that are not mentioned but do, in my view, merit a mention are:

The division of labour, the invisible hand, mercantilism, Say's law, equilibrium, the Harrod-Domar model, expectations, efficiency, the use of forecasting models, innovation, technical progress and endogenous growth.

Other changes would no doubt force themselves on me once I got started, but for now I wish to give everyone who is interested an opportunity to comment on the above and make further suggestions.

Nick Gardner 11:27, 16 October 2007 (CDT)

I am inclined to agree [especially about the missing authors], although Modigliani and Tobin always seem to get a mention in these things. Becker is interesting because of his visibility in other social sciences, but it doesnt mean he is central in this topic, of course. Galbraith is revered by the social democratic left, which I suppose might be a reason to retain him. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 12:10, 16 October 2007 (CDT)

Perhaps the best way to handle the issue--the way most textbooks handle it--is to cover all the main schools of economic thought and the most influential economists they produced. That is why Commons, Galbraith, Sombart, Stone, Burns, Greenspan, Weber, Becker, Kautsky, Hansen, Modigliani and Tobin get mentioned--as major intellectual leaders or (in the case of Greenspan and Burns, applied leaders of NBER school). These are the people who in fact shaped the 20th century in economic thought – none gets more than a line or two, so we are not being excessive. (Tobin was on my dissertation committee—but he is on the list mostly because he was one of the half-dozen most influential Keynesians, along with Hansen, Modigliani, & Samuelson) The approach we do NOT want to take it to assume what the “true” school is, and overemphasize it. Richard Jensen 19:29, 16 October 2007 (CDT)

I should like to change what is at present mainly a history of economic thinkers into a real history of economic thought. So I should be willing to retain a reference to (say) Sombart only in the context of a readable account of his contribution to the development of the discipline. The present inclusion of people who have made unstated contributions serves no purpose beyond that of providing references, and it gets in the way of telling the story of how economics has developed (and many of the references seem unhelpful in that respect). I see the history of economic thought as a fascinating story of continuing intellectual exploration, and I should like to convey that feeling to the reader. The present text gets nowhere near achieving that. Perhaps I am trying not to follow the lead of the textbooks!

Nick Gardner 07:20, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

We cannot assume there is one main stream of economic thought. --the history is much too complex to allow that view, as the multitude of textbooks in the history of economic thought attest. There are multiple approaches and methods in economic thought. As Keynes pointed out, old forgotten economists in many ways rule the real world, and CZ should tell readers about them. I have been working on the articles on Malthus, Marshall and Friedman--all very different birds indeed.Richard Jensen 07:34, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

I agree with all you say and I look forward to reading your articles. But my point remains that we should tell our readers about the contributions of old forgotten economists - and not just their names. I should be delighted to reinstate any economist for whom you cite a significant contribution that can be explained in terms that would be intelligible to the lay reader. Nick Gardner 11:59, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

The Nobel Prize committees have very convenient short summaries for the last 30 years. The article is much too short right now, but the solution is to make it longer, not shorter. I think in general that the biographical entry is the place for specialized discussions of the specific contributions of Marshall, Commons, Pigou, Fisher, Samuelson, Tobin. This article should tell users the who's who and give a general idea of what they did and (my interest) relate them to "schools" of thought. Richard Jensen 12:29, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

I don't think I agree, Richard. This article should contain an explanation of each author's contribution. More detailed discussion of an author's life can be provided in biographies, but that is not relevant here. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 12:32, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

This survey must cover everybody (or every school) of importance. Well it's a matter of space. If you can explain it in two sentences it belongs here (Friedman on consumption function probably fits in 2 sentences); otherwise we should mention that "Arrow worked on the voting problem" and leave the full explanation to the bio or to a specialized article. But we have to have Arrow here. In some cases (eg the list of Italians) they can all be deleted.Richard Jensen 12:38, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

Pareto is too important not to be included. I don't mind where, but he has to be in this article. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 12:56, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

well I've always thought of him as a sociologist of elites and inequality. (I use Pareto's law of inequality all the time) Richard Jensen 13:19, 17 October 2007 (CDT) I put Pareto back in with a reference.Richard Jensen 13:28, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

Pareto-optimality is a basic sort of general equilibrium which is significant in the evolution of theoretical economics, and still used at least in university courses.--Martin Baldwin-Edwards 13:33, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

Good point. I'll add a line on that. Richard Jensen 13:53, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

Rather than argue the point further, I'd prefer to do some editing and drafting. For example, I am itching to replace the single-sentence explanation of Adam Smith's contribution with something that the intelligent layman will understand and see the importance of. And that would be just a start. Barring a strong objection, here goes! Nick Gardner 15:41, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

The contribution of Alfred Marshall

I have cleared away some empty links and made some minor changes, in preparation for some possible further drafting on Marshall's contribution. Nick Gardner 05:59, 17 October 2007 (CDT)

The contribution of David Hume

I am aware that David Hume has been referred to (cursorily) in the article on pre-classical economics. But it strikes me as absurd to put the contributions of Hume and Smith - who were like-minded contempories and close friends - into two separate articles. I suggest cutting him out of the pre-classical article. Nick Gardner 16:50, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

Additions and Redrafts

My main purpose so far has been to outline as briefly as possible the contributions of Adam Smith, and to give due credit to Hume and the Physiocrats. Perhaps I have been too terse in my treatment of Smith? But note that I have created a link to what I consider to be a muchc-needed article devoted exclusively to The Wealth of Nations.

Nick Gardner 09:42, 19 October 2007 (CDT)

Pareto and Ricardo

I have added new articles on Vilfredo Pareto‎ and David Ricardo‎, with zip from Wikipedia. Richard Jensen 06:37, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

A tentative restructuring

This is just a cockshy.

I have not deleted anything so that my innovations can easily be reversed.

I shall leave this for a few days to give people time to think about it and comment.

Questions:

• The neoclassical list seems confusingly long. Should anyone be dropped or moved to the "other contributors" paragraph?
• Should anyone be added?
• Should the order be changed?

Nick Gardner 08:19, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Don't worry about the need to revert: anything you delete can be easily reverted, if somone insists. As we apparently have an article on neoclassical, it would be a good idea to minimise the content here to key issues, and provide a link to the other article.

Change the order if you think it makes better sense. Nothing is written in stone, until the article is approved. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 09:52, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

We also have a separate article on classical economics, I've just discovered. I plan to leave open the possibility of links to both - but also the possibility that you decide to get rid of them (you might consider their academic style daunting to the layman). Nick Gardner 11:20, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

How is it that we get separate sections for 4.7 Kenneth Arrow (underneoclassical?) 4.8 Robert Solow (belongs in a Growth group) 4.9 Robert Lucas (rational expectations can be a heading) 4.10 Paul Romer (not a major figure?) It's hard to see why they are so important. My recommendations is to take a couple recent standard textbooks and use their chapter headings rather than reinvent the wheel. The topic has been the subject of many major books in which the authors though out the categories. So use their wisdom. One interesting Italian textbook with a very well designed organization is at [1] Richard Jensen 10:09, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Thanks, I'll consider introducing some sub-sub headings as I go along. Nick Gardner 11:20, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

an outline seems necessary for such a complex topic. Richard Jensen 12:36, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

point taken: I will try to provide one. Nick Gardner 02:22, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

You're an early bird, Nick! I am about to go to sleep for a few hours, as I was working all night:-( --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 02:26, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

Malthus text

"The model continues to play a major role in the making of population policies" appears in the Malthus section. I don't know of any policy maker who has interest in Malthus other than idle intellectual curiosity. What is your reason for putting this remark, Richard? --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 17:40, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

I revised the Malthus section to bring it more in line with our Malthus article. (In this survey it does not seem necessary to say that X agreed with Adam Smith....most economists did so.) As for population theory, he remains one of the most influential figures. Everybody teaches population with a discussion of Malthus. JSTOR reports that in economics journals since 1970, Malthus is mentioned in 1747 articles. That seems pretty dramatic, even without looking at the 1676 articles in history and sociology journals. Richard Jensen 17:48, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

University courses are not the same thing at all as policy-making. Also, being mentioned in journal articles is not the same thing as being the current orthodoxy. I think we should remove that sentence, but you can replace it with something about his ideas forming the basis of modern population theories, if you like. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 18:06, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

what is the current othodoxy? Malthus proposed a problem that still very much bothers us. We see it in operation in Africa today (and India and China just a few years ago). He also was one of the first to use a mathematical model to predict the future of mankind--surely a major advance. I can't imagine anyone doing the long-term economics of population without using (or rejecting) a Malthusian model. The issue is not whether Malthus made correct predictions (we would have a very short article), but whether he structured our way of thinking about major issues. Richard Jensen 18:30, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

I had been about to revise the text on Malthus to note that his postulates concerning population growth and agricultural output were based upon the assumptions that there would be no birth control and no change in agricultural productivity - that they were postulates concerning which evidence was lacking at the time, and which have subsequently been shown to have been incorrect. I find it very difficult to accept that it was in any sense a model of population growth: surely it was no more than an assertion about population growth? And if it is referred to at all by practitioners of the subject, surely it could only be to note that Malthus got it wrong? (I do hope that we are not going to ask readers to accept Paul Ehrlich's forecasts?) Nick Gardner 01:17, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

Yes, I agree completely, Nick. We talk about Malthus to say that he got it wrong, and fertility levels and productivity changes [to a much lesser extent, migration] have made the predictions incorrect. THe model is nothing more than simple arithmetic, which most economists can perform quite easily without refderring to Malthus! --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 01:38, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

No we do not talk about Malthus to "say he got it wrong." First of all that is not true--he did discuss birth control (one of the first to do so), and his model is used by policymakers discussing Africa today: "Population in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow at 3 percent a year and food production at less than 2 percent. If current trends in population growth and food production continue, by the year 2020, the World Bank estimates that Africa alone will have a food shortage of 250 million tons." [2] and 2005 update at [3] For Malthus disease models see The Lancet (2005) at [4] More important he created the model we use. To say the model is "simple" misses the point that nobody before him say the point and everyone afterward did. It directly inspired Darwinian models of nonhuman population. It's one of the first (the very first?) of the great social science models re predictions. That puts Malthus in all the textbooks, and in all the encyclopedias. In a more general sense, the Malthus model says that population growth exceeds resource growth. Take water, which is just as important as food. That's what the policymakers out in California and Arizona talk about endlessly: people are growing much faster than water. Take highways--they also talk about that a lot in Los Angeles.

This is a very academic point of view you are espousing, Richard. I am sure that all population policy people I have met would be very suprised to hear that they are dependent on Malthus. When we hear a Beethoven sysmphony, we don't rush to celebrate the medieval monks whose music forms the basis of all western music. Generally, population calculations are very simple: what is actually difficult is predicting which variables might remain constant and which could change significantly. Malthus made terrible predictions, and to a great extent his reputation was forged from the gloom and doom scenario. Similarly today, when we get the gloom peddlers talking about population problems, I am not impressed. We have resource allocation problems in the world, and this is what economics should be more concerned about. You can mention Malthus as a pioneer, but I don't accept that "he continues to play a major role....". I think it should be removed from the text. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 05:40, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

we must keep in mind this is NOT a policy-oriented article and it is NOT about current macro/micro econ -- it is about the history of thought--a very academic subject indeed. And for policy makers they certainly do say they are inspired by Malthus today --look at [5] for explicit recognition of that fact in the leading British medical journal, Lancet. Richard Jensen 08:46, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

I can find nothing in the essay on population to justify the claim that Malthus assumed that "advances in agricultural productivity are eventually limited". (His illustrative estimates went no further than to suggest that they would be insufficient to keep up with population growth.) So I think that sentence must go. And although I accept that Malthus got Darwin thinking about population pressures on the survival of species, It seems to me to be a gross exaggeration to claim that it was the foundation of his theory of natural selection.

In any case, neither that nor Malthus's antipathy to birth control seem relevant to the history of economic thought. So what I suggest is this:

In his influential Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Thomas Malthus postulated that the population would grow at a geometric rate (2, 4, 8, 16...) while food production could only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4 ....) and concluded that the food supply would eventually be insufficient to support the population. That conclusion led him to oppose the introduction of the Poor Law and to advocate the protection of agriculture. In other respects he followed Adam Smith in opposing government intervention in commerce. Evidence in support of his postulates was lacking at the time and they have since been found to be mistaken.

(Incidentally, despite the headlines, your references attribute malnutrition to poverty, not to food shortages)

Nick Gardner 09:14, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

punctuation

Re: my change of three periods. Quirk, et al., The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, p. 1629: "If a sentence or set of sentences is included as a digression in a paragraph, parentheses are required and final punctuation marks precede the closing parenthesis." (my emphasis). Jeffrey Scott Bernstein 08:30, 22 October 2007 (CDT)