Faculty Role Models and Diversifying the Gender and Racial Mix of Undergraduate Economics Majors

The sex, race, and undergraduate composition of newly minted Ph.D.s in economics is analyzed. Liberal arts colleges are shown to yield a disproportionate number of female economists while economists of color tend to come from comprehensive universities.     

Foreign Students and Graduate Economic Education in the United States

Of late, over half the Ph.D.'s awarded in economics in the United States have gone to foreigners. At the same time, time-to-completion of a Ph.D. has risen. The presence of many foreign students in graduate economics programs may provide some insight for this longer duration. This article explores this relationship and offers an explanation for the large number of foreign students studying in the United States.     

Qui docet discit

Academic economists play many roles; researchers, policy advisor, teacher, etc. While each of these roles is important for the career advancement of an economist, the most important role of academic economists is teaching future citizen economists. It is incumbent upon economists qua teacher to prepare them to make sense of the world they will inhabit. We must, therefore, not teach economics, at least at the introductory level, as if it is the first course on the way to a Ph.D., but as if it is the last class the students will ever take in economics. A consistently subjectivist economics is the best way to teach future citizen economists. When students understand economics as something that helps them make sense of the world, rather than a course in applied mathematics, they will be better citizen economists less likely to fall prey to those selling them free lunches.     

Teacher training for PhD students and new faculty in economics

Past studies suggest that a majority of economics graduate students engage in teaching-related activities during graduate school and many go on to academic positions afterwards. However, not all graduate students are formally prepared to teach while in graduate school nor are they fully prepared to teach in their first academic position. The authors characterize current teaching experience and training of graduate students from the point of view of directors of graduate studies and of newly minted academic economists. The authors also query department chairs and new faculty about teacher training, support available for new faculty, and the degree to which newly hired Ph.D. economists are prepared to teach. Findings indicate that while some training is available, there is room for enhancing teacher training in economics.     

The Market for New Ph.D. Economists

Multinomial logit analysis, based on survey questionnaires, shows that graduate program ranking, length of time in the Ph.D. program, publications, and marital status are important determinants of occupational outcome for new Ph.D. economists.     

Foreword to the Symposium

This paper investigates a number of aspects of Piero Sraffa's early philosophical thinking by placing him within the historical materialist tradition of reasoning about the relation of ideas to the historical process. It first distinguishes Alfred Marshall's views about the historical development of ideas by addressing Marshall's responses to the criticisms of William Cunningham of the English Historical School. Marshall's concept of economics as a universal engine of discovery was rejected by Sraffa in his early writings. Sraffa's critique of Marshall is then argued to lead to two early philosophical commitments on Sraffa's part: that deductivist modes of explanation are inappropriate in economics and that economics aims to explain the underlying structures of causal interaction that had been the concern of the classical political economists. The paper closes with brief remarks on how Sraffa's later philosophical thinking might be approached.     

Doctoral Origins of Contributors to the American Economic Review, 1960-72

Professor Sun concludes that publishing performance, adjusted for differences in the number of Ph.D.'s granted, is not a function of the quality of graduate schools. Larger institutions appear to have an advantage by turning out a larger number of Ph.D.'s, but no correlation was found when the number of contributors to the AER from a school was compared with the rating of its graduate programs.

Economics departments may hope to improve their rating in doctoral programs by producing more Ph.D.'s and encouraging them to contribute to the AER, Professor Sun concludes.     

The Effectiveness of Graduate Students as Teachers of the Principles of Economics

Everyone involved in the teaching of economics (but particularly program advisers, thesis sponsors and departmental administrators) would benefit from a greater knowledge of the factors associated with success on the part of students. Robert L. Decker, Executive Director of the Economics Department at the University of California in Berkeley, reports on a study of success and attrition characteristics of economics students entering the Ph.D. program. Among the factors considered are the overall Ph.D. completion rate, median time spent in the program, class size, the nature and quality of the candidate's undergraduate institution, sex, and time elapsed between completion of the baccalaureate and entry into the Ph.D. program. Decker concludes his paper with a discussion of the policy implications of his findings.     

Balkanization and assimilation: Examining the effects of state-created homogeneity

Charles Dickens was a reformer who sought to reform economic conditions. Convinced that the reforms proposed by the economists of his day would not benefit those victimized by the Industrial Revolution, he also sought to reform economics. Dickens' prime targets were McCulloch, Malthus, and Nassau Senior. Reviewing Dickens's efforts at social reform, Chesterton made the distinction between pessimistic reformers, who describe how bad people are under bad conditions, and optimistic reformers, who describes how good people are under bad conditions. The author draws similar parallels between mainstream economists and social economists.     

"Never Intended to be a Theory Of Everything": Domestic Labor in Neoclassical and Marxian Economics

This article is a comparative study of the treatment of domestic labor by neoclassical and Marxian economists. Before 1960, mainstream economics concentrated on production for the market, with serious analysis of housework confined to a handful of economists, whose efforts in this regard were marginalized by economics departments but supported by departments of home economics. Later mainstream analyses, first in agricultural economics and then in human capital theory, culminated in Gary Becker's "new household economics." Domestic labor was also neglected by Marxist thinkers, who argued that housework was being socialized under capitalism and would disappear altogether under socialism, but it was rediscovered by Marxist-feminists in the late 1960s. Housework continues, however, to pose serious analytical difficulties for both neoclassical and Marxian economists.     

The Editorial Boards of Italian Economics Journals: Women,Gender, and Social Networking

In Italy, women's advancement in economics has been curtailed by the structure of editorial boards of Italian economics journals. In this paper, we examine the presence of men and women economists on the editorial boards of thirty-six Italian economics journals published since 1970 and analyze the gender distribution across different kinds of boards, roles, and fields. Because boards are hierarchically ordered, women work mostly in the lower positions, and the increase in women's participation has led only to more "editorial secretaries." Since men and women tend to have different scientific interests and men's standards of academic value prevail, women economists cannot build publication records as strong as those of their male colleagues, which, in turn, affects women's hiring, promotion, and wages, as well as the shape of the discipline.     

Ecodynamics. A New Theory of Societal Evolution

The purpose of this essay is to provide an alternative approach to studying the rhetoric of policy-oriented economics suggesting that the range of economic-policy possibilities is conditioned by the rhetoric of economics. To this end, Martin Feldstein's pro-privatization rhetoric will be compared to that of President Bush. In doing so, we will aim at showing that just as the political rhetoric of Social Security invokes the authority of "ideographs" such as personal ownership to draw on a society's ideological and cultural repertoire, economic rhetoric undertakes a similar task by employing "economic ideographs" like deadweight loss to resonate with fellow economists through an appeal to the implicit normative premises embedded in the language of economics.     

Continuity and change: Mapping the community of economists in Greece (1944 to 1967)

Abstract

This paper combines quantitative, biographical and qualitative data to trace out the structure and dynamics of Greece's post-war community of economists, and explore its implications for the country's economic discourse. Greek economics was a state-centred profession whose fate was intertwined with that of the post-war developmental state apparatus. Most economists were employed in universities, the civil service or banking, with substantial interpenetration between branches. This configuration of professional constituencies, in conjunction with the structural features of each institution, conditioned the form and content of economic discourse. Professional and ideological cohesion went hand in hand, whilst substantial degrees of vertical and horizontal control by senior members further fostered consensus and increased professional sclerosis. Nevertheless, evidence from a new database of economic journal publications suggests that a substantial realignment took place in the late 1950s and 1960s, as a younger generation of scholars – most of them educated in the post-war UK/US, and affiliated with the newly established Centre for Planning and Economic Research – entered the scene.     

Margaret G. Reid: Life and achievements

Feminist critics of mainstream economics, and of the neoclassical paradigm in particular, have focused primarily on exposing and questioning the gender biases and androcentric claims to neutrality, objectivity and rationality of the most male-dominated discipline among the social sciences. The scientific method and mathematical sophistry so cherished in the discipline have also come under severe attack from several quarters. However, despite the intellectual ferment and some practical gains for women that these criticisms have engendered, even today the substantial contributions several women scholars have made to the field of economics are not well known or fully acknowledged. This paper traces and highlights Margaret Reid's contributions to the development of some core theories in economics. While several of her male colleagues whose work she had inspired or contributed to have been awarded the Nobel Prize, the discipline of economics still owes a huge debt to Reid and to several other women economists.     

Getting the better of Becker

This paper identifies three ways in which feminist economists can reclaim the economic discourse on the family from the new home economics and, in so doing, “get the better of Becker”: first, take what is useful from Becker's analysis, use it to advocate policies to improve the status of women, and discard the rest; second, develop alternatives – preferably feminist alternatives – to Becker's analysis; third, discover the features of the economics profession which have led to acceptance of Becker's more dubious analyses, and try to change those features.     

Does Libertarian Paternalism Reconcile Merit Goods Theory with Mainstream Economics?

In the wake of Musgrave's move to question the absolute hegemony of individual preferences for normative economics in the 1950's by propounding the existence of merit goods, a recent book by Thaler and Sunstein is now making a similar claim under the label of ‘libertarian paternalism’. This paper tackles the question of why the framework of libertarian paternalism has received a so much more friendly reception among economists than the theory of merit goods. The main reason is a better foundation, not only for the conditions under which paternalism may be justified but also for the tools that should be applied, utilizing transaction cost theory.     

Slonimsky's view on Antoine-Augustin Cournot∗

Abstract

In 1878 the Russian Liudvig Zinov'sevich Slonimsky published a lengthy article on the mathematization of economics. To defend the legacy of applying mathematics in the study of economics, he made ample uses of both von Thünen and Cournot's works. The article published in Russian and in the Russian Vestnik Evropy (Journal of Europe) has passed virtually ignored by economists. This notes gives a complete account of Slonimsky's references to Cournot's work.     

Œuvres économiques complètes

The thesis advanced in this paper is that economists, qua economists, need study and practise the history of economic thought. The ‘cumulative view’ of economics is criticized and opposed to the ‘competitive view’ stemming from Kuhn and Lakatos. Schumpeter's distinction between two stages of economic theorizing–conceptualization and model-building–is recalled. The role of the history of economic thought as a way to investigate the conceptual foundations of different theories is thus pointed out. Some conclusions are then drawn concerning the kind of history of economic thought relevant for the formation of economic theorists.     

What remains of the growth controversy ∗

Nobel laureate R.M. Solow (1992) reflected that, ‘The Kaldor–Kalecki–Robinson–pasinetti line made life harder for itself by being part of a wholesale attack on mainstream economics. Anyway, it was not ever able to muster a body of serious applied work’. This article considers the accuracy of an assessment like Solow's of the sucess of the growth theorys that economists have proposed as alternatives to neoclassical growth theory. The article, which takes an historical perspective, focuses on Kaldor's growth theory.