2016 Hes Presidential Address: Statistical Inference in Economics, 1920–1965: Changes in Meaning and Practice

The History of Economic Thought From the Viewpoint of Hes Presidential Addresses

“…In this direction Barber (1990) suggests further investigations on the international transmission of economic ideas, deeply analyzing "the way in which countries that are potential importers of economic ideas respond to that exposure such as established modes of thinking influenced by a secular religion or, perhaps, by a non-secular one, and the implications of imported doctrine for the role of a bureaucracy" (p. 122). Jeff Biddle (2017) instead suggests that the analysis of empirical research from the 20th century be developed from a historical perspective to understand "the changes over time in the sort of evidence and arguments that economists find convincing" (p. 171). Finally, to continue to consider themselves a branch of economics, historians of economic thought will have to continue to veer against the prevailing wind (Whitaker 1985) and a natural alliance is suggested by John Davis (2002), with heterodox "economics' alternative tradition of thinking about individuals as socially embedded" (p. 152).…”

Investment Planning and the Input-Output Model in Postwar Europe

“…As conferences and seminars were starting again in the postwar, Leontief and the BLS economists defended the input-output framework in front of other economists, econometricians and statisticians. This led Leontief to a series of debates with economists working on statistical inference, macroeconomics and linear programming (Boumans, 2009;Akhabbar, 2005;Biddle, 2017;Carret, 2022). One of the most consistently criticized assumptions made by Leontief concerned the constancy of the coefficients of production; he defended this hypothesis on practical and theoretical grounds, but also by expanding his model to take into account the dynamic problem of technological and structural change via productive investment.…”

Milton Friedman’s Empirical Approach to Economics: Searching for Scientific Authority While Shaping the University of Chicago Economics Department

“…8 4 See Hammond (1999bHammond ( , 2019, Frazer and Boland (1983, p. 133), Karl Brunner (1976, p. 595), and Ericsson, Hendry, and Hood (2016. 5 On the spread of Fisher's ideas into statistics and economics in the United States, see Biddle (2017). 6 At the NRC, Friedman was recruited by fellow student and future Chicago School mainstay Allen Wallis, who had been hired earlier in 1935; Friedman's future wife, Rose Director, also worked briefly on the same project, as did Erika Schienberg, a student of Paul Douglas, and Alice Hanson Jones, another doctoral student at Chicago.…”

“… 5 On the spread of Fisher’s ideas into statistics and economics in the United States, see Biddle (2017). …”