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This is a, somewhat indirect, rejoinder to Boettke (2019, this volume, Chapter 1). Doing Austrian economics is low prestige: Austrian economics does not get published in high-prestige journals and Austrian economists are not employed by top universities. And yet, up until World War II Austrian economics was an important part of the international economics community. The author argues that Austrian economists made several theoretical innovations that could have placed them at the frontier of research in economics, and present a brief counterfactual history of a thriving Austrian economics based on those innovations. However, the actual history of the Austrian School is quite different. A particularly decisive factor that has made Austrian economics a fringe movement was the rejection of formal methods in theory and empirics. The author argues that Austrian economics is basically dying out as a voice in the conversation of modern economists.

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

Since the early days of Cliometrics (the application of economic theory and quantitative methods to the study of economic history) in the 1960s, Jeffrey Williamson has been one of its most active contributors and his output shows no immediate signs of letting up. Furthermore, he has continued throughout to employ the basic cliometric tools of applied economic theory and quantitative analysis. In contrast, Douglass North and Robert Fogel, recognized with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for their contributions in founding the field of cliometrics, have gone subsequently in more interdisciplinary directions. North has increasingly emphasized the importance of institutions and cultural norms while also incorporating perspectives from cognitive science. Fogel has increasingly incorporated biological approaches in his work and indeed by his own admission has left the field of economic history for an interest in health economics and a field he terms bio-demography. Throughout his career, Williamson has had numerous students and collaborators of considerable distinction in their own right. And this festschrift in his honor incorporates the work of several generations of cliometricians and can thus be regarded as providing an overview of developments in cliometrics over the past 40 years as well as the current state of play in the field.

Describes how the opinions about Wilhelm Roscher and his work developed during the century following his death in the USA. Possible reasons for the changes are explored. Special attention is given to the more favourable reception of Roscher in the USA as opposed to the UK. A central point is that his influence and importance in the USA changed as time passed and with the development of professional economics. Suggests new reading of Cunningham′s essay. Attention is drawn to some of Roscher′s works in English that have been neglected. Some problems of periodization in the history of economic thought are investigated. Several conventional judgements are challenged and possibilities for further research suggested.

This chapter uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Muller is typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours. However, this chapter argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place – the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon – the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. This chapter investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors – Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, this chapter offers an intersectional reading of Muller that incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

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

This article considers what contribution traditional library practices — identification, selection, organisation and retrieval — can make to managing networked information, and how those practices need to be updated to take account of the special difficulties of the Internet. The answer is found in cooperation. Cooperation between librarians and authors in the creation of metadata. International cooperation between librarians to select resources. The article defines a workflow for cooperation in both fields, and proposes a library search engine to hold jointly created records and a catalogue of Websites online to support selection.

Martin Bronfenbrenner was born in Pittsburgh in 1914. His father was an eminent bacteriologist and immunologist. His mother was a pioneering historian of science who died in an automobile accident a few months after his birth. Martin received his BA in political science from St. Louis University in 1934 and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1939. He received a Certificate in the Japanese language from the University of Colorado enabling him to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war (he later said that the experience “developed skills that still come in handy on oral examinations” (Bronfenbrenner, 1987)). He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State, the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Tech, Aoyoma Gakuin, and Duke University. He was president of the Southern Economic Association, the History of Economics Society, and the Atlantic Economic Association and served as vice president of the American Economic Association. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association.

If I do not count the introductory essay by the editors, the book Economics and Language (Henderson, et al., 1993), can be divided into three substantive parts. The first is titled rhetoric and critical theory, the second, controversy and hedging in economics, and the third, language and the history of economic thought. Again not counting the introduction, the volume consists of a total of ten essays: four in the first part and three each in the remaining two. In Part I, the reader is introduced to a realist philosophy of economic rhetoric, to Ricoeur and the significance of the hermeneutic project for economics, to Bakhtin's dialogism in the formation of the canon, and to the relevance of Derrida and of deconstructive methods for rational choice theory. Part II is concerned with the “stylistics” of two sets of material: with the “debate” between Milton Friedman and his critics; and with 11 articles chosen from a recent issue of the Economic Journal. Finally, the three essays in Part III are devoted to Adam Smith, to Edgeworth and to the response of six elementary textbooks to a “puzzle” of economic theory.