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Book part
Publication date: 15 October 2019

Luca Fiorito

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon…

Abstract

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

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Including a Symposium on Robert Heilbroner at 100
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-869-7

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Abstract

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Further Documents from F. Taylor Ostrander
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-354-9

Book part
Publication date: 23 July 2016

Nicola Giocoli

At the turn of the 20th-century railroad regulation was hotly debated in the United States. Railways were accused of abusing of their monopolistic position, in particular by…

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th-century railroad regulation was hotly debated in the United States. Railways were accused of abusing of their monopolistic position, in particular by discriminating rates. Public opinion’s pressure for tighter regulation led to the 1906 enactment of the Hepburn Act, which strengthened the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission. American economists actively participated in the debate. While most of them sided with the pro-regulation camp, the best economic analysis came from those who used the logic of modern law and economics to demonstrate how most railroads’ practices, including rate discrimination, were simply rational, pro-efficiency behavior. However, as relatively unknown Chicago University economist Hugo R. Meyer would discover, proposing that logic in public events could at that time cost you your academic career.

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Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-960-2

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Article
Publication date: 1 February 1990

Robert B. Ekelund and Robert F. Hébert

Edward Hastings Chamberlin, a great innovator in economic theory,has been badly served by his “followers”, who have“blanked” and “distorted” his message. Today itis the Chicago…

Abstract

Edward Hastings Chamberlin, a great innovator in economic theory, has been badly served by his “followers”, who have “blanked” and “distorted” his message. Today it is the Chicago critics of monopolistic competition, not his self‐appointed followers at Harvard, who are developing an economics of industrial organisation that more nearly captures the spirit of Chamberlin′s work. Chamberlin′s central insight was that quality dimensions and other means of product differentiation are essential elements (in addition to nominal prices) in the analysis of how economic markets actually work. Although Chamberlin initially tried to fit his theory into the conventional mould of Marshallian economics, with predictably unsatisfactory results, this should not be allowed to obscure the novelty and robustness of his contribution.

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Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 17 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

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Article
Publication date: 1 December 1999

Roger J. Sandilands

Reproduces the main texts of hitherto unpublished reminiscences of the style and influence, as a teacher, of Allyn Abbott Young (1876‐1929) by 17 of his distinguished students…

Abstract

Reproduces the main texts of hitherto unpublished reminiscences of the style and influence, as a teacher, of Allyn Abbott Young (1876‐1929) by 17 of his distinguished students. They include Bertil Ohlin, Nicholas Kaldor, James Angell, Lauchlin Currie, Colin Clark, Howard Ellis, Frank Fetter, Earl Hamilton, and Melvin Knight (brother of Frank Knight who, with Edward Chamberlin, was perhaps Young’s most famous PhD student). There has recently been a revival of interest in Young’s influence on US monetary thought and in his theory of economic growth based on endogenous increasing returns. These recollections of his students (addressed to Young’s biographer, Charles Blitch) shed light on why Young has, at least until recently, been renowned more for his massive erudition than for his published writings.

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Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 26 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

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Article
Publication date: 1 April 1983

D.P. O'Brien

In 1933 two books on competitive structure were published. One, extracted from a Harvard PhD filed six years earlier, dealt with the workings of the competitive process. Seeking…

Abstract

In 1933 two books on competitive structure were published. One, extracted from a Harvard PhD filed six years earlier, dealt with the workings of the competitive process. Seeking not to supplant, but to supplement Marshall, this book by E. H. Chamberlin focused on an effort involving the use of a diagrammatic apparatus to highlight certain fundamental relationships between variables in the competitive process. It did not analyse real firms but nor did it attempt to pretend that such were irrelevant, and to concentrate on positions of competitive equilibrium only. It dealt with problems of arrival at equilibrium, false trading, and a whole variety of issues relevant to an actual competitive process. Supervised by Allyn Young, it drew on a wide range of references and showed evidence of the kind of thorough scholarly preparation which has always been characteristic of the best American PhDs.

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Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 10 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

Book part
Publication date: 20 November 2018

Florencia Sember

The Central Bank of Argentina began its activities in May 1935 surrounded by controversy. The Bank was created as a result of a mission led by the expert from the Bank of England…

Abstract

The Central Bank of Argentina began its activities in May 1935 surrounded by controversy. The Bank was created as a result of a mission led by the expert from the Bank of England, Sir Otto Niemeyer. The foreign involvement in the origins of the bank was not welcome to a good part of the Argentine society. Finally, the project for a central bank approved by the Argentine Congress was not the one proposed by Sir Otto Niemeyer, but a version of it that contained crucial modifications introduced by Raúl Prebisch. The aim of this work is to highlight Prebisch’s ideas on monetary and banking matters by analyzing the differences with the ideas of Sir Otto Niemeyer around monetary policy and the characteristics of the future Central Bank of Argentina. Even if there were almost no direct debates between them, there were different visions and indirect contentions that can be traced in the writings of both, which on the side of Prebisch were published in the Revista Económica del Banco de la Nación Argentina and some government documents, and on Niemeyer’s side can be traced in some writings and correspondence regarding his visit to Argentina, held in the archives of the Bank of England.

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Including a Symposium on Latin American Monetary Thought: Two Centuries in Search of Originality
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-431-2

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Article
Publication date: 1 March 1990

Roger J. Sandilands

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor,survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to themodern neo‐classical writers. The focus…

Abstract

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

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Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 17 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1990

Thomas O. Nitsch

The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In…

Abstract

The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality in the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. … The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably. [Sic!] — John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919/20; Chap. II, sec. III), “Europe before the War,” “The Psychology of Society.”

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Humanomics, vol. 6 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0828-8666

Abstract

The paper published below was prepared by Taylor Ostrander for Frank Knight’s course, Economic Theory, Economics 301, during the Fall 1933 quarter.

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Documents from F. Taylor Ostrander
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-165-1

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