The words "more complete, measured, and rigorously developed synthesis" should not be applied to Overtveldt's error-ridden hagiography. 

Robert Leeson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bradley R. Turner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, 7 May, 2011 8:35:18 AM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] RVW -- Diamond on Emmett, ed., _The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics _

For a more complete, measured, and rigorously developed synthesis, see The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers who Revolutionized Economics and Business (2007), by Johan Van Overtveldt. 


Friedman, on the cover, describes it as "Thorough and extraordinarily well informed." 



On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Humberto Barreto < [log in to unmask] > wrote: 


------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------ 
Title: The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics 

Published by EH.NET (May 2011) 

Ross B. Emmett, editor, /The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of 
Economics/. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010. xi + 350 pp. $200 
(hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84064-874-4 

Reviewed for EH.Net by Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Department of Economics, 
University of Nebraska at Omaha. 

The Chicago School of economics has been described in a variety of ways.  In 
the current volume, a useful description is given in the essay of Bruce 
Kaufman who emphasizes “... a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship and 
open academic debate, an uncompromising belief in the usefulness and insight 
of neoclassical price theory, and a normative position that favors and 
promotes economic liberalism and free markets”  (p. 133). 

The volume has been edited by Ross Emmett, a Michigan State historian of 
economic thought whose previous research has focused on early Chicago 
economist Frank Knight.  About two-thirds of the volume consists of fifteen 
“Essays on the Chicago School” in Part 1.  The remaining third of the 
volume, in Part 2, consists of nineteen brief profiles of “Some Chicago 
Economists.” 

The only essay that attempts any kind of broad overview of the volume is 
Emmett’s four-page introduction.  His essay briefly establishes the 
historical context of the Chicago School and points us toward some of the 
earlier literature in the history of economic thought that discusses the 
Chicago School.  But it does not attempt to summarize the diverse messages 
of the essays of the volume, let alone try to synthesize these messages into 
any overarching conclusions. 

Synthesis would have been difficult, if not impossible, because of the 
apparent absence of any consistent criteria for selection of the contents. 
This volume appears to be opportunistic in the sense that the contributors 
often were culled from those who attended conferences with the editor on the 
Chicago School, and the editor has left the contributors considerable leeway 
in the length, content and style of what they have contributed.  Emmett 
openly admits (p. 3) that some important topics have been left out of the 
“Essays” section of the volume.  But he does not identify the most 
glaring omission:  the contributions of George Stigler and his colleagues, 
such as Brozen, Demsetz and Peltzman, to industrial organization and the 
economics of regulation. 

Most of the essays adopt a neutral, expository stance, reporting the main 
research contributions of various Chicago scholars on various topics.  Some 
of these essays are written by scholars with some connection to the Chicago 
School, and some simply by scholars with an interest in the history of 
economic thought.  Among the expository essays, economic historians will 
especially appreciate David Mitch’s chronicle of Chicago’s contributions 
to economic history, with some discussion of Earl Hamilton, and special 
attention to Fogel and McCloskey; and Hugh Rockoff’s extensive account of 
the genesis and findings of Friedman and Schwartz’s tour de force in /A 
Monetary History of the United States/. 

Some of the other expository essays are fairly detailed accounts of aspects 
of the Chicago School, e.g., Daniel Hammond’s thorough account of Friedman 
and Stigler’s development of Chicago price theory; and Daniel Benjamin’s 
account of the three most important papers by Armen Alchian. Others paint 
with a broader brush, but provide useful overviews of their topics, e.g., 
Steven Medema’s account of the development of Chicago law and economics; H. 
Spencer Banzhaf’s account of the development of Chicago welfare economics; 
and Gordon Brady’s account of the Chicago School “roots” of the 
Virginia School that was James Buchanan’s early intellectual home. 

Parts of Eric Schliesser’s essay are less expository and more tendentious 
-- implying that Milton Friedman was indirectly responsible for the worst 
that Pinochet did in Chile.  When Schliesser’s essay was earlier presented 
to the American Economic Association, Deirdre McCloskey powerfully and 
persuasively defended Friedman.  Part of McCloskey’s defense was her 
report of a Chicago economics faculty meeting she attended, where Friedman 
had successfully argued for turning down funding that had been offered to the 
department from a repressive regime.  But in this volume, Schliesser’s 
critique of Chicago is left unanswered.  The volume would have been better 
if it had included both sides. 

Nineteen economists are included in the profiles of the “Some Chicago 
Economists” part of the volume.  The basis for selecting the nineteen is 
not obvious.  If we limit ourselves to economists who fit Kaufman’s 
description of the Chicago School, then it is hard to understand the absence 
of Nobel-Prize-winning Chicago economists Milton Friedman (yes, /Milton 
Friedman/ is absent), Robert Lucas, James Heckman, James Buchanan, Robert 
Mundell, Merton Miller and Robert Fogel.  And if we adopt a broader concept 
of the Chicago School, as Emmett seems to do when he includes Paul Douglas 
among his nineteen, then it is also hard to understand the absence of 
Thorstein Veblen (an early editor of Chicago’s /Journal of Political 
Economy/), and F.A. Hayek. 

The profiles that are included often have useful information.  But much of 
importance is omitted, sometimes due to the brevity of the profiles, and 
sometimes due to the agendas of the profile authors. The four pages on George 
Stigler, for instance, focus primarily on his biography, who he associated 
with, and a selection of his political views; but give scant attention to his 
wit, his erudition, and his contributions to research, especially in the area 
of the history of economic thought.  And to make matters worse, the 
bibliography to the profile neglects to reference key works that do focus 
mainly on Stigler’s research.  (The Wikipedia entry on Stigler does a 
better job.) 

But on the other hand, it was good to see Evelyn Forget’s profile of 
Margaret Reid included in “Some Chicago Economists.”  When I was a 
graduate student at Chicago, Reid had been long retired, but she still 
regularly attended Becker’s workshop, and still pursued her research.  In 
those days, graduate students would spend long hours at the computer center 
with their decks of IBM punch cards, to wait their turn to run their 
regressions on the mainframe.  And it did not entirely escape our attention 
that Margaret Reid was there too, with her deck of cards, waiting her turn. 
Her presence and her persistence taught us something about the values of the 
Chicago School --something that Klamer and Colander would later reconfirm in 
their interviews with graduate students in /The Making of an Economist/.  At 
Chicago, economic research was not just some puzzle-solving game by which you 
earned your living; not something you retired from; economics was a calling 
that mattered. 

References: 

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. / A Monetary History of the 
United States, 1867-1960/, NBER Studies in Business Cycles.  Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 1963. 

Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. / The Making of an Economist/.  Boulder, 
CO: Westview Press, 1990. 

Arthur M. Diamond Jr. received three graduate degrees from the University of 
Chicago, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in economics at the University.  He 
has recently published several papers related to Schumpeter’s process of 
creative destruction and is at work on a book entitled /Openness to Creative 
Destruction/. [log in to unmask] . 

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( [log in to unmask] ). Published by EH.Net (May 2011). All EH.Net reviews 
are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview . 

Geographic Location: North America 
Subject: History of Economic Thought; Methodology 
Time: 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII 



-- 

Bradley Turner 
A.M. Social Science 2011 
The University of Chicago 
Fulbright Fellow 2012 
Department of Social and Moral Philosophy 
The University of Helsinki