Introduction: What UW-Madison Professors Professed: Commons, Perlman, and Bronfenbrenner

Abstract

This essay comments on what three eminent UW-Madison economists taught during the first half of the 20th century: John R. Commons (1862–1945), Selig Perlman (1886–1959), and Martin Bronfenbrenner (1914–1997). What we know about what and how they taught varies. Interestingly, little or no effort has been made to preserve records that might inform us about what college and university economists taught their students and when and how new ideas and issues found their way into the teaching of economics. This thought first came to me in the years immediately following my joining the UW-Madison faculty in January 1965. I realized that many of us who gained experience in the policy arena while on leave in Washington DC during the 1960s incorporated that experience into our teaching at all course levels. This meant our students benefited from being on the cutting edge of emerging policy issues, such as poverty, negative income tax, human capital, military draft, and the all-volunteer army, the Kennedy round trade negotiations, tax policy, and cost–benefit analysis. We regularly incorporated these issues into our teaching, usually a half-dozen years before they made their way into the next edition of the textbooks and thus reached a wider student audience. Once incorporated into textbooks, these issues became much less interesting to teach because they had been boiled down to pedestrian textbook-style prose.

Citation

Lee Hansen, W. (2011), "Introduction: What UW-Madison Professors Professed: Commons, Perlman, and Bronfenbrenner", Johnson, M. and Samuels, W.J. (Ed.) Wisconsin, Labor, Income, and Institutions: Contributions from Commons and Bronfenbrenner (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 29 Part 3), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. vii-xxii. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-4154(2011)000029C002