Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438883
J. Biddle
Zvi Griliches was one of the leading econometricians of his generation. His early work involved empirical analyses of the sources of productivity growth in twentieth-century US agriculture, including his dissertation on the diffusion of hybrid corn and his analysis of the long-run growth in fertilizer use by US farmers. In this research Griliches developed theoretical explanations of these phenomena in the form of narratives of rational, profit-seeking people responding to changing circumstances and novel information, and he used these narratives to inform his decisions about what statistical techniques to employ and how to implement them. Narratives served the same purposes for Griliches that mathematical models were coming to serve in the work of his contemporaries, but they made more sense for Griliches, given his belief that he was analyzing transitions between economic equilibria, a process for which economists had not developed useful mathematical models.
{"title":"Narratives and Empirical Strategies in Zvi Griliches's Early Research","authors":"J. Biddle","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438883","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Zvi Griliches was one of the leading econometricians of his generation. His early work involved empirical analyses of the sources of productivity growth in twentieth-century US agriculture, including his dissertation on the diffusion of hybrid corn and his analysis of the long-run growth in fertilizer use by US farmers. In this research Griliches developed theoretical explanations of these phenomena in the form of narratives of rational, profit-seeking people responding to changing circumstances and novel information, and he used these narratives to inform his decisions about what statistical techniques to employ and how to implement them. Narratives served the same purposes for Griliches that mathematical models were coming to serve in the work of his contemporaries, but they made more sense for Griliches, given his belief that he was analyzing transitions between economic equilibria, a process for which economists had not developed useful mathematical models.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45337550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438855
M. S. Morgan, T. Stapleford
Narratives have drawn increasing attention from economists and from historians and philosophers of science. Yet little of that attention has made it into the history of economics itself. This essay reviews some of the salient literature on economic narratives and introduces key themes from a 2021 workshop intended to bring that analysis to bear within the history of economics. Four important, but little noticed, functions of narratives emerging from that workshop are highlighted: exploration, explanation, closure, and reopening; and promising areas for future research on the multiple roles of narrative in the history of economic practice are suggested.
{"title":"Narrative in Economics: A New Turn on the Past","authors":"M. S. Morgan, T. Stapleford","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438855","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Narratives have drawn increasing attention from economists and from historians and philosophers of science. Yet little of that attention has made it into the history of economics itself. This essay reviews some of the salient literature on economic narratives and introduces key themes from a 2021 workshop intended to bring that analysis to bear within the history of economics. Four important, but little noticed, functions of narratives emerging from that workshop are highlighted: exploration, explanation, closure, and reopening; and promising areas for future research on the multiple roles of narrative in the history of economic practice are suggested.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48303853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438953
Laetitia Lenel
Abstract This article explores the history of scenario drafting at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1970s and 1980s. Introduced in the late 1970s, scenarios were used to compare, assess, and illustrate the assumed effects of different policy actions or inactions. They provided alternative versions of a hypothetical future, derived from the research staff's narrative reasoning by which the IMF researchers stitched together qualitative and quantitative assessments, macroeconomic theories, and policy preferences, and presented an instrument to guide policymaking in member countries. The article points to four different functions of narrative in economic reasoning: as a sense-making technology, as a tool of persuasion, to fill in gaps and correct quantitative reasoning, and to link alternative policy measures to changes in parameters and variable inputs in complex econometric models. And yet, by focusing on the often-futile consultations with the United States, the article also highlights the limits of narrative. The article challenges Robert Shiller's description of the spread of an economic narrative as a “random event,” pointing instead to economists' role as storytellers.
{"title":"Economists as Storytellers: Scenario Drafting at the International Monetary Fund","authors":"Laetitia Lenel","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438953","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the history of scenario drafting at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1970s and 1980s. Introduced in the late 1970s, scenarios were used to compare, assess, and illustrate the assumed effects of different policy actions or inactions. They provided alternative versions of a hypothetical future, derived from the research staff's narrative reasoning by which the IMF researchers stitched together qualitative and quantitative assessments, macroeconomic theories, and policy preferences, and presented an instrument to guide policymaking in member countries. The article points to four different functions of narrative in economic reasoning: as a sense-making technology, as a tool of persuasion, to fill in gaps and correct quantitative reasoning, and to link alternative policy measures to changes in parameters and variable inputs in complex econometric models. And yet, by focusing on the often-futile consultations with the United States, the article also highlights the limits of narrative. The article challenges Robert Shiller's description of the spread of an economic narrative as a “random event,” pointing instead to economists' role as storytellers.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135031372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438869
H. Maas
It is well known that Marshall had great difficulty in organizing his work after the Principles. The promised second volume never came, and for the books that eventually were published, Industry and Trade (1919) and Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923), Marshall was at pains to find the right mode of expression for his research. In the introduction to the Principles, Marshall had explained his reliance on partial equilibrium analysis and, more generally, ceteris paribus reasoning as the natural method of the economist, for which his method of diagrams was an excellent fit. But already while working on his Principles Marshall had moved closer to economic history. In a letter of June 1879 to Jevons, he had praised Jevons's statistical work as an important step in “‘real’-ising” the abstract theories of economists, in which he promised to follow suit. However, while Jevons tried to flesh out mathematical relations that captured the economic causalities hidden in statistical data, Marshall started to explore a different strategy, a strategy that explains his criticism of “mathematico-statistics” and the waning away of his initial enthusiasm for the method of diagrams as an engine of discovery. Instead of relying on the ceteris paribus method, which would examine one causal factor at a time, Marshall searched for an approach that captured the causalities in the economy as an encompassing whole. A shorthand for this approach is his famous epigraph to Industry and Trade: “The many in the one, the one in the many.” Moving away from the opposition between abstract theory and economic facts, Marshall tried to develop a strategy that mediates between the generic categories of the economist and the specific events of history that are the domain of the economic historian. In contrast with the ceteris paribus strategy Marshall embraced in his Principles, in which an incomplete analysis is improved by adding causal factors, Marshall explored what this article calls a narrative strategy, in which he tried to work out how to integrate a manifold of heterogenous causal factors into a unified whole, thus providing causal coherence to a complete chronology of events. The purpose of my contribution to this issue is to explore the development and substance of this narrative strategy. This article will use Jevons's and Marshall's different cartographies of time as an entry point to understand Marshall's narrative take on the causal explanation of the facts of history.
{"title":"Marking Time: Marshall's Search for Narrative Explanatory Coherence","authors":"H. Maas","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438869","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 It is well known that Marshall had great difficulty in organizing his work after the Principles. The promised second volume never came, and for the books that eventually were published, Industry and Trade (1919) and Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923), Marshall was at pains to find the right mode of expression for his research. In the introduction to the Principles, Marshall had explained his reliance on partial equilibrium analysis and, more generally, ceteris paribus reasoning as the natural method of the economist, for which his method of diagrams was an excellent fit. But already while working on his Principles Marshall had moved closer to economic history. In a letter of June 1879 to Jevons, he had praised Jevons's statistical work as an important step in “‘real’-ising” the abstract theories of economists, in which he promised to follow suit. However, while Jevons tried to flesh out mathematical relations that captured the economic causalities hidden in statistical data, Marshall started to explore a different strategy, a strategy that explains his criticism of “mathematico-statistics” and the waning away of his initial enthusiasm for the method of diagrams as an engine of discovery. Instead of relying on the ceteris paribus method, which would examine one causal factor at a time, Marshall searched for an approach that captured the causalities in the economy as an encompassing whole. A shorthand for this approach is his famous epigraph to Industry and Trade: “The many in the one, the one in the many.” Moving away from the opposition between abstract theory and economic facts, Marshall tried to develop a strategy that mediates between the generic categories of the economist and the specific events of history that are the domain of the economic historian. In contrast with the ceteris paribus strategy Marshall embraced in his Principles, in which an incomplete analysis is improved by adding causal factors, Marshall explored what this article calls a narrative strategy, in which he tried to work out how to integrate a manifold of heterogenous causal factors into a unified whole, thus providing causal coherence to a complete chronology of events. The purpose of my contribution to this issue is to explore the development and substance of this narrative strategy. This article will use Jevons's and Marshall's different cartographies of time as an entry point to understand Marshall's narrative take on the causal explanation of the facts of history.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46083586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438925
Luca Casonato
This article investigates how Israel Kirzner approached mainstream economists with his view of the Austrian theory. It discusses the role of narrative elements in Kirzner's theory in his use of stories to illuminate ideas in entrepreneurship, the theory of firm, and the knowledge problem. This article argues that the use of narrative made Kirzner's theory more open to dialogue without tying him to the scientific demarcation criteria used in mainstream economics. The scientific narratives in Kirzner's work allow him to (i) emphasize the logical order of economic phenomena, (ii) highlight causal mechanisms in economic theory, (iii) make some generalizations but without perfect predictions with economics, (iv) explore different scenarios from contingent events in the economy, and (v) illustrate economic ideas with fictional but plausible cases. The article concludes that these narrative aspects help Kirzner illuminate the limitations of neoclassical economics and offer an alternative perspective based on the entrepreneurial state of “alertness” from an Austrian point of view.
{"title":"Israel Kirzner's Use of Narratives to Illuminate the Limitations of Neoclassical Economics and the Austrian Alternative","authors":"Luca Casonato","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438925","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates how Israel Kirzner approached mainstream economists with his view of the Austrian theory. It discusses the role of narrative elements in Kirzner's theory in his use of stories to illuminate ideas in entrepreneurship, the theory of firm, and the knowledge problem. This article argues that the use of narrative made Kirzner's theory more open to dialogue without tying him to the scientific demarcation criteria used in mainstream economics. The scientific narratives in Kirzner's work allow him to (i) emphasize the logical order of economic phenomena, (ii) highlight causal mechanisms in economic theory, (iii) make some generalizations but without perfect predictions with economics, (iv) explore different scenarios from contingent events in the economy, and (v) illustrate economic ideas with fictional but plausible cases. The article concludes that these narrative aspects help Kirzner illuminate the limitations of neoclassical economics and offer an alternative perspective based on the entrepreneurial state of “alertness” from an Austrian point of view.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43152334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438939
Alexandra Quack, Catherine Herfeld
One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but been spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William Riker—a major protagonist in pushing the adoption of game-theoretic models in political science—this article examines the transfer process as one of “translation” by which abstract and mathematical rational choice models were constructed and modified such that they applied to a specific target system in a new domain. In this article, the argument is that to overcome a set of challenges that hampered the straightforward transfer of game-theoretic models into political science, Riker complemented theoretical and conceptual modifications of von Neumann and Morgenstern's game schemes with the use of narratives to turn them into applicable and testable models. As such, those narratives played a crucial role in enabling their transfer and ultimately facilitated the applicability of game-theoretic models in political science.
{"title":"The Role of Narratives in Transferring Rational Choice Models into Political Science","authors":"Alexandra Quack, Catherine Herfeld","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438939","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but been spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William Riker—a major protagonist in pushing the adoption of game-theoretic models in political science—this article examines the transfer process as one of “translation” by which abstract and mathematical rational choice models were constructed and modified such that they applied to a specific target system in a new domain. In this article, the argument is that to overcome a set of challenges that hampered the straightforward transfer of game-theoretic models into political science, Riker complemented theoretical and conceptual modifications of von Neumann and Morgenstern's game schemes with the use of narratives to turn them into applicable and testable models. As such, those narratives played a crucial role in enabling their transfer and ultimately facilitated the applicability of game-theoretic models in political science.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49651511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10438897
Daniel Kuehn
Abstract In his 1962 NBER volume, The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and data limitations. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or “travelers' tales” to replace or interpret quantitative data. Nutter's book is littered with these tales of Soviet economic activity from Soviet émigrés, foreign visitors, and reports of Soviet citizens. The tales provide a narrative grounding for The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union by outlining the flow of data through the Soviet statistical bureaucracy, establishing the strengths and limitations of Soviet data, and aiding in the interpretation of difficult-to-measure concepts such as product quality and military production.
沃伦·纳特(Warren Nutter)在其1962年出版的《苏联工业生产的增长》(The Growth of Industrial Production In Soviet Union)一书中写道，对苏联经济的研究如何受到官方保密和数据限制的阻碍。西方经济学家被迫依靠纳特所说的“马可波罗经济学”或“旅行者的故事”来取代或解释定量数据。纳特的书中充斥着这些关于苏联经济活动的故事，这些故事来自苏联的移民和外国游客和苏联公民的报告。这些故事为《苏联工业生产的增长》提供了叙事基础，概述了苏联统计官僚机构的数据流，确立了苏联数据的优势和局限性，并帮助解释了产品质量和军事生产等难以衡量的概念。
{"title":"“Marco Polo Economics” and Narrative in the NBER Soviet Growth Study","authors":"Daniel Kuehn","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10438897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10438897","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In his 1962 NBER volume, The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and data limitations. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or “travelers' tales” to replace or interpret quantitative data. Nutter's book is littered with these tales of Soviet economic activity from Soviet émigrés, foreign visitors, and reports of Soviet citizens. The tales provide a narrative grounding for The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union by outlining the flow of data through the Soviet statistical bureaucracy, establishing the strengths and limitations of Soviet data, and aiding in the interpretation of difficult-to-measure concepts such as product quality and military production.","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135031373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo","authors":"Sergio Cremaschi","doi":"10.2307/jj.168325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.168325","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47668289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-02DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10327407
Pierrick Clerc
{"title":"Debates in Macroeconomics from the Great Depression to the Long Recession: Cycles, Crises, and Policy Responses","authors":"Pierrick Clerc","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10327407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10327407","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41601065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-02DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10327280
{"title":"Three Hundred Years of Adam Smith","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/00182702-10327280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-10327280","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47043,"journal":{"name":"History of Political Economy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42235152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：