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The Economists' Papers Project at Duke University --
A Sample from the Don Patinkin Papers
Stephen Meardon
Duke University and
Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, A.C.
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Previous contributions to this editorials list have argued for writing
the history of economics with a more sociological or more contextual
approach; a genuine "historical study" as opposed to an extended "review
essay." James Henderson urges us to consider that "economic knowledge is
created in real time" -- and with this in mind, to use research materials
that may reflect knowledge creation better than the obvious primary
sources. Roy Weintraub awaits the day when "writing and research in the
history of economic thought will increasingly approach the standards of
historical writing in the history of physics or the history of mathematics
or the history of medicine."
A likely way to reach these ends is to dig through archives, the
unpublished personal and professional papers of individuals and
institutions. But to do so requires familiarity with details of the
relevant archives: their locations, their contents, and a very concrete
idea of how they can be used to thicken one's research. The purpose of
this editorial is to provide some of these details for one large archive
in particular: the Economists' Papers Project at Duke University.
In an attempt to achieve the purpose with a bit of flair, a small
selection from the archive -- a 1957-58 correspondence between Don
Patinkin and John Hicks, drawn from the Patinkin papers -- has been
scanned for access on the world wide web. Its historical relevance is
explained below.
The following draws partly from joint work with Roy Weintraub, Ted Gayer,
and Spencer Banzhaf, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature.
Contents of the Duke Archive
The Economists' Papers Project was initiated in the early 1980's by
Craufurd Goodwin, Neil de Marchi, and E. Roy Weintraub of Duke's Department
of Economics, and Special Collections Librarian Robert Byrd. Its purpose is
to collect at one site valuable and otherwise scattered archive materials,
relating primarily to the 20th century history of economics, in order to
make these materials more accessible to researchers. In earlier years this
required a lengthy process of introducing the Project to potential donors
and persuading them of the advantages of donating the papers to Duke --
rather than, in most cases, the university where the economist was tenured.
It was argued that Duke was one of the few universities with the
facilities, the will, and the interest among faculty and graduate students
to preserve the papers and ensure they would be used. However after several
years of building the archive it can now sell itself by virtue of its
scale: the growing number of collections attracts ever larger numbers of
researchers to the Duke Special Collections Library, where, as originally
hoped, they may find useful more than just one of the collections. The
historian of game theory studying Morgenstern may also be interested in
Shubik; the historian of the "Chicago School" may want to look through the
papers of Griliches, Rees, Lewis, Jones, Patinkin, Bronfenbrenner, and
Hamilton. The archive now includes the twenty-seven collections listed in
the table below, with several more committed.
Collections Received (size of collection in linear feet)
Arrow, Kenneth J. (55.5)
Baumol, William J. (46.5)
Bloomfield, Arthur I. (12.0)
Bronfenbrenner, Martin (21.0)
Clower, Robert (6.0)
Domar, Evsey D. (33.0)
Fetter, Frank W. (114.0)
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (36.2)
Griliches, Zvi (12.0)
Hamilton, Earl (29.9)
Hildreth, Clifford (1.5)
Hoover, Calvin B. (43.0)
Jones, Homer (1.5)
Lewis, H. Gregg (21.2)
Menger, Carl (10.0)
Menger, Karl (39.0)
Metzler, Llyod (14.0)
Morgenstern, Oskar (30.0)
North, Douglass C. (1.1)
Patinkin, Don (121.5)
Perlman, Mark (54.0)
Rees, Albert E. (10.5)
Shubik, Martin (15.0)
Smith, Vernon L. (28.5)
Spengler, Joseph (88.4)
Stolper, Wolfgang (6.0)
Weintraub, Sidney (10.0)
The size of the collections vary. The Douglass North papers consist of less
than one standard file box of material; the Don Patinkin papers fill
eighty. The contents of collections are similarly variable. They may
consist of correspondence, lecture notes (taken while student or produced
as teacher), data, documents, and more sensitive materials: referee's
reports, tenure evaluations, and so on. Even a rough sketch of each of the
collections would be quite lengthy -- so that will be left to the
Economists' Papers Project website at the Duke Special Collections
Library, where detailed descriptions and box lists are either already
available or will soon be so. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/economists/
Nevertheless at least some idea of the archive's rich and variable
contents can be provided by citing examples from each of several types of
material.
Student Notes and Lecture Notes: The Kenneth Arrow Papers contain the notes
he took as a student at City College of New York and Columbia University,
and the notes and syllabi for courses he later taught on Price and
Allocation Theory, The Theory of Competitive Equilibrium, and The Theory of
Information and Organization.
Data: The Earl Hamilton papers contain notes and data relating to Spanish
economic history, which he used to write "Wages on Spanish Warships,
1503-1660" (JPE, 1929) and other papers. The Zvi Griliches papers contain a
large amount of data and graphs on acres planted and yields of hybrid corn
in the mid-west in the 1920's and 30's. He used this data to write his
Ph.D. thesis, and it was the starting block for his work on technological
change.
Manuscripts: The Martin Shubik papers contain drafts of his Game Theory in
the Social Sciences, a project originally begun with Lloyd Shapley.
Diaries: The Oskar Morgenstern papers contain a diary he kept nearly
continuously from his student days until his death, which records the
process of collaboration with John von Neumann as well as his own political
shifts in his Vienna days. It also provides a unique glimpse of his
remarkable friendships with Albert Einstein and Kurt Goedel at Princeton.
Referees' reports: As associate editor of Econometrica, Nicolas
Georgescu-Roegen was involved in both soliciting and writing referee's
reports for that journal. He coordinated the refereeing process of Arrow
and Debreu's "Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy," of
which the reports and related correspondence offer a fascinating view of
the process by which a seminal proof was accepted by the economics
profession (Gayer and Weintraub, 1998; Gayer, 1997).
Administrative letters and documents: The papers of Mark Perlman, founder
and editor from 1969 to 1981 of the Journal of Economic Literature,
contains ten boxes of correspondence pertaining to administration of the
JEL. Such documents can provide evidence for researchers in the sociology
and economics of the economics profession.
Other Documents: The Arrow papers include material related to his roles as
consultant (to the National Research Council, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Association, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research)
and political advocate (for Senator Al Gore, arms control, Middle East
peace, and human rights). The Karl Menger papers are a treasure trove of
material on the life of the mathematical community in Central Europe in the
inter-war years, and the attempts to link Austrian economics and
mathematics in the Mengerkreis (and related Vienna Circle) of the
pre-Anschluss period.
Correspondence: The Patinkin papers, the largest collection, is richest in
its correspondence. Fully forty-four of the eighty boxes contain
correspondence. Patinkin was a meticulous record-keeper, so the files
contain copies of the letters he wrote as well as those he received. They
are from every year of his professional career and involve almost every
colleague: Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, Roy Harrod, Harry Johnson, Simon
Kuznets, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson, among literally hundreds of
others.
The Archive as Research Material: An Illustration from the "Last Skirmish"
of "Keynes and the Classics", by way of the Don Patinkin Papers
Having taken a very quick and broad view of the whole archive, we'll now
pull from it a single file for closer examination. Reproducing a few
specific documents on the world wide web and discussing their contents may
aide this introduction of Duke's Economists' Papers Project -- providing
the "very concrete example" mentioned earlier of its usefulness in
historical research in economics. (See
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/economists/patinkin/ for copies of the
correspondence identified below.)
The file is from Box 25 of the "Correspondence" series of the Patinkin
papers. It contains a number of letters between Patinkin and John Hicks,
dated between July 1957 and January 1958. Their correspondence thus took
place after the publication of Patinkin's 1956 Money, Interest, and Prices
(MIP) and Hicks's 1957 review of MIP for the Economic Journal ("A
Rehabilitation of Classical Economics?"), but before Patinkin's 1959
rejoinder ("Keynesian Economics Rehabilitated"). Leijonhufvud (1969, p.17)
designated the latter two articles the "last skirmish" of the "Keynes and
the Classics" debate.
An interpretation of this "last skirmish" based solely upon the articles
themselves would probably not be very charitable to Hicks. It might run as
follows: in MIP Patinkin showed that if real money balances affect
consumption and saving decisions, and unemployment causes prices to fall,
then real balances will rise, the IS curve will shift outward, and
unemployment will be eliminated -- at least in long-run static equilibrium.
In his 1957 review Hicks claimed Patinkin had not considered carefully the
liquidity trap, which may indeed cause unemployment to persist in static
equilibrium; Hicks illustrated his argument diagrammatically without a
shifting IS curve. In his 1959 rejoinder Patinkin once again drew a diagram
with a shifting IS curve, showing one more time why unemployment is
eventually eliminated. With that, everybody was convinced that Hicks's
premises led to Patinkin's conclusion; and thereafter, those who didn't
like Patinkin's conclusion were exiled to Post-Keynesianism.
This history -- which is also fairly consistent with the interpretation of
Leijonhufvud (ibid., pp.17-18) -- leaves one questioning what Hicks, whose
brilliance nobody would dispute, could possibly have been thinking.
A thicker history, which acknowledges that "economic knowledge is created
in real time", can answer that question. In the Duke archive one finds that
the two year span between Hicks's review and Patinkin's rejoinder was
filled by the correspondence mentioned above. The correspondence points to
the exact source of Hicks's error with a precision that the texts
themselves, and a history based solely upon them, can not.
Hicks began the correspondence immediately after his review was published
and Patinkin asked him for reprints. He admitted that his "chaps" at Oxford
thought he hadn't given Patinkin "enough credit for making the consumption
function depend on the stock of money", so he asked Patinkin to help him
clear up the matter (Hicks to Patinkin, 7/6/57). Patinkin's first letter in
response already contained all the content that would later be published as
the 1959 rejoinder (Patinkin to Hicks, 8/19/57). In fact Patinkin's
counter-argument was at this stage already in such detail that Hicks needed
three months to digest it (Hicks to Patinkin, 11/13/57), and eventually
admitted that he had been "rather frightened of it"! (Hicks to Patinkin,
12/31/57)
Nevertheless, even after reading the counter-argument Hicks was not yet
convinced. He explained exactly why he didn't see fit to shift his IS
curve: his method could be represented algebraically by eliminating real
money balances from the IS equation by substitution from the LM. The
solutions for the interest rate and income could still be found at the
point of intersection of the LM curve and this different IS curve, but a
fall in prices would correspond to a movement along the IS, not a shift.
And since the IS formed in this way doesn't shift in response to deflation,
neither would it seem that the economy can be lifted out of a liquidity
trap by deflation.
The problem, as Patinkin pointed out in his next letter (Patinkin to Hicks,
1/27/58), was that Hicks had forgotten to check whether the shape of an IS
curve constructed in this way still supported his conclusion. By
representing their discussion algebraically and taking the total derivative
of the IS equation associated with Hicks's argument, Patinkin showed that
its slope was not everywhere negative: if there were a minimum interest
rate, as the liquidity trap argument suggests, then Hicks's IS curve would
have to be horizontal at that rate. And that being the case, deflation and
the resulting outward shift of the LM alone would still eliminate
unemployment in static equilibrium.
The correspondence between them on the topic ends with that letter. It is
difficult to imagine that Hicks did not find Patinkin's final argument
persuasive. From that time forward, to discuss unemployment in the context
of the model, one had to accept Patinkin's explanation of the phenomenon in
terms of the model's dynamics rather than its static equilibrium. The
alternative was to abandon the model altogether.
The conventional history is clear on this last point, but misses much of
what took place during the "last skirmish" of the "Keynes and the Classics"
debate. Hicks is portrayed as a critic who simply forgot to shift his IS
curve -- which is not surprising, since in the published record Patinkin
relegated to a footnote the only trace of his argument that really
addressed Hicks's questions (Patinkin 1959 p.585 fn.3). Reading their
unpublished correspondence suggests a different interpretation. Patinkin's
1959 rejoinder to Hicks was written to persuade the general readers of the
Economic Journal -- who never saw, and thus did not understand, the full
development of Hicks's argument. The rejoinder was not written to persuade
Hicks, whom Patinkin took care of a year and a half earlier by different
means. In public the "skirmish" may have come down to an IS curve that
should have moved, but in private it was about the different possible
techniques of solving the model graphically and algebraically, and the
question of the equivalence of their results.
This does not amount to an overturning of the history based solely upon the
published texts, but it adds a layer to that history that otherwise
couldn't exist. Thicker histories are of course comprised of many such
layers. Archive materials, of which Duke's Economists' Papers Project is a
large repository, allow them to be written.
References
Gayer, Ted. 1997. Hazardous Waste Risks, Housing Prices, and Economic
Methodology. Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University.
Gayer, Ted and E.R. Weintraub. 1998. "Refereeing Arrow-Debreu: A View of
the Mathematization of Economics". Working Paper.
Hicks, John R. 1957. "A Rehabilitation of 'Classical' Economics?". Economic
Journal 67: 278-89.
Leijonhufvud, Axel. 1969. Keynes and the Classics: Two Lectures on Keynes'
Contribution to Economic Theory. (Institute of Economic Affairs Occasional
Paper 30). Westminster, U.K.: The Institute of Economic Affairs.
Patinkin, Don. 1956. Money, Interest, and Prices: an Integration of
Monetary and Value Theory. Evanston, Illinois: Row Peterson.
Patinkin, Don. 1959. "Keynesian Economics Rehabilitated: A Rejoinder to
Professor Hicks". Economic Journal 69: 582-7.
Patinkin, Don. 1942-95. The Papers of Don Patinkin. The Economists' Papers
Project, Duke University Special Collections Library.
Weintraub, E.R.; Stephen Meardon; Ted Gayer; and Spencer Banzhaf.
"Archiving the History of Economics". Journal of Economic Literature,
forthcoming.
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