This paper offers a bibliographic survey of the literature in the history of economic thought (HET) in eight major economics journals, using theJELclassification to retrieve and analyze the relevant literature. Our study shows that, though contributions to HET are still found in top economics journals, the rate of publication of such papers has become increasingly uneven, and the methods and narrative styles they adopt are remote from those used by historians of economics. We show that the widespread idea that historians should address current economists by using their (mostly mathematical) tools and techniques is hardly present in mainstream journals, and discuss the role of editors and editorial boards of the different journals we survey in shaping these changes over time. We conclude that historians should focus on doing good work on their own, rather than try to figure out what the economists’ preferences are, and undertake research accordingly.
A macroeconomia de hoje em dia é chamada de nova síntese neoclássica, sugerindo que ela representa uma reencarnação da síntese neoclássica da década de 1950. Tal sugestão nos levou a examinar o conteúdo das sínteses "velha" e "nova". Nossa principal conclusão é que a nova síntese tem pouca semelhança com a velha. Além disto, argumentamos que: (a) desde sua origem com Paul Samuelson a síntese neoclássica não tinha um conteúdo definido e nós apresentamos quatro principais deles; (b) em sua interpretação mais pertinente, aquela proposta por Solow e Mankiw, tal síntese representa uma defesa de uma macroeconomia pluralista na qual modelos de curto prazo com desequilíbrio conviveriam lado a lado com modelos de equilíbrio de longo prazo; (c) uma distinção precisa ser feita entre os novos keynesianos de primeira e segunda gerações porque os primeiros defendiam a velha síntese, enquanto que os últimos, com seus modelos DSGE, aderiram à visão Lucasiana de uma macroeconomia baseada em um único modelo básico.
* Background material for a Presentation on June 6, 2007 at the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics, at the Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University. † This article is based on parts of my Ph.D. dissertation. I thank CAPES (Brazil) for financial support. I am very grateful to professors Roy Weintraub, Kevin Hoover, Neil de Marchi, Craufurd Goodwin and Craig Burnside for all encouragement and suggestions. I thank also Kirk White, Tiago Mata and Paul Dudenhefer for comments and criticisms. As usual, I am responsible for the final outcome and any remaining inaccuracies.
Although economists recognized long ago that “time enters into all economic questions,” as William Stanley Jevons wrote, the ways they treated and modeled time varied substantially in the last century. While in the 1920s there was a distinctive Cambridge tradition against discounting utilities of future generations, to which Frank Ramsey subscribed, postwar neoclassical growth economists (of the “Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model”) applied the discount factor either to the individual's or the social planner's decision making as a technical requirement of dynamic general equilibrium models. My goal in this article is to analyze the different communities and their interpretative practices regarding discounting: the Cambridge economists in the 1920s, some American mathematicians in the 1920s and 1930s, a group of economists working on economic dynamics from the 1930s to the 1950s, the founders of the optimal growth model and those bringing recursive methods to macroeconomics in the 1950s and 1960s, and, finally, those who reacted against this utilitarian approach to social planning problems. With this I hope to shed some historical light on how a practice that was condemned as ethically indefensible when applied to intergenerational comparisons became a technical requirement in dynamic models of either a consumer or a planner deciding the intertemporal allocation of resources.
Just as islands-isolated places with unique, rich biodiversityhave relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life.
Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quarter of all journal articles in economics and in nearly half in macroeconomics. Surprisingly, its rise as an essential element in the vocabulary of economists can be dated only to the early 1970s. We trace the history of shocks in macroeconomics from Ragnar Frisch and Eugen Slutsky in the 1920s and 1930s through real business cycle and DSGE models and to the use of shocks as generators of impulse-response functions, which are in turn used as data in matching estimators. The history is organized around the observability of shocks. As well as documenting a critical conceptual development in economics, the history of shocks shows that James Bogen and James Woodward’s distinction between data and phenomena must be substantially relativized if it is to be at all plausible.
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930) was a Cambridge mathematician who made important contributions not only to philosophy, mathematics, logic, and probability, but also to economics. Ramsey made two major contributions to economics, both published in the Economic Journal in 1927 and 1928, which became popular only in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, economists portrayed Ramsey as a sleeping giant: a mathematician who had almost no impact on the economics profession prior to 1950 because his mathematical analysis was out of the reach of the typical economist of his time. My goal in this article is to understand how Ramsey's growth model became part of the neoclassical literature on economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s and how Ramsey became a sacred predecessor of this field. In order to better understand the stabilization of Ramsey's growth model in postwar economics, I conduct a JSTOR search and consult a few book references. Based on this dataset, I conclude that Ramsey was in fact “awake” in the economic growth literature pre-1950. I discuss as well the main economists who transported Ramsey from the Cambridge milieu of the 1920s to the North American economics of the postwar period.
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