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Ross Emmett's post about the teaching of the History of Economics refers to 
Haney's 1911 text that was influenced by an earlier manuscript by Richard T 
Ely, and to Richard Howey's 1983 article on Frank Knight's teaching of the 
subject at Cornell, 1913-14, and later at Chicago. He also mentioned 
Charles Bullock as having taught it at Harvard from 1903-35. 
 
Allyn Abbott Young's name should be mentioned in all these contexts.  
 
First, he played a major role in revamping the 1908 edition of Richard 
Ely's 1893 text in which 4 chapters were given over to economic history and 
one to the history of economic thought. Ely et al was the most popular 
economics text in the US until the 1930s. 
 
Second, Young took over the supervision of Frank Knight's PhD disertation 
at Cornell in 1913. According to a letter (1980) from Richard Howey to 
Young's biographer, Charles Blitch, there is a letter dated March 30, 1910 
in the Seligman papers at Columbia in which Young talks of his impending 
move from Stanford to take up a one year visiting post at Harvard. He says: 
"I have been continuing Veblen's course in the History of Political Economy 
and have put a lot of work on it; but that, I imagine, is covered by 
Bullock and Gay." Howey goes on to note that when Young moved on a more 
permanent basis to Harvard in 1920 he taught "Modern Schools of Economic 
Thought", a course descended from "Economics 22" which Edwin Gay (whom 
Young did not much like, partly because of Gay's enthusiasm for the German 
historical school) had been teaching in 1910. Young repeated this course 
every year thereafter until he left for the LSE in 1927. 
 
Howey's letter to Blitch, together with 17 others (including from James 
Angell, Colin Clark, Melvin Knight, Frank Fetter, Lauchlin Currie, Eleanor 
Dulles, Bertil Ohlin, Earl Hamilton and Nicholas Kaldor), was published 
last year as "New Evidence on Allyn Young's Style and Influence as a 
Teacher", Journal of Economic Studies, 26:6, pp. 453-80. (I can send an 
electronic version of this paper to anyone who wants it. ) 
 
Bertil Ohlin wrote: "I took a very stimulating course from Professor Young 
at Harvard in 1922-23. The subject was History of Economic Doctrine. He 
impressed me immensely. I am inclined to believe that he was a man who knew 
and thoroughly understood his subject better than anyone else I have met." 
 
Overton H. Taylor, who himself later taught the history of economic thought 
class at Harvard, wrote: "Young's main influence on me was exerted through 
his other course on "Modern Schools of Economic Thought". That began with a 
few brilliant introductory lectures on the Physiocrats and Adam Smith... 
and went on to deal with the "classical school" of Ricardo and his 
disciples, and J S Mill and others; and Jevons, the Austrians, and other 
"marginalists", and Marshall; and various socialist writers - tho' I don't 
think he did much with Marx; and the German historical schools; and the 
American Institutionalists -- chiefly Veblen and Wesley Mitchell..." 
 
At the LSE Young taught Nicholas Kaldor. Kaldor's notes were published in 
the Journal of Economic Studies in 1990 and include a fair amount of the 
history of thought. 
 
Just before his untimely death during an influenza epidemic in March 1929, 
Young had been negotiating in Cambridge with Herbert Foxwell for the sale 
to Harvard of Foxwell's immense library. Foxwell also came down with a 
severe bout of flu but survived. 
 
Young was invited to prepare the entry on the history of economic thought 
for the 1928 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Reprinted in Perry 
Mehrling and Roger Sandilands (eds.), "Money and Growth: Selected Papers of 
Allyn Abbott Young", Routledge, 1999.) This entry was maintained in 
subsequent editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but in 1951 a very 
lightly revised version of Young's entry appeared under Frank Knight's name 
-- testimony to the respect in which Knight held Young. 
 
Roger Sandilands 
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