It should be noted that Allyn Young (1876-1929) had a reasonably sophisticated exposition of the competitive constraints on monopoly pricing, with diagrams showing the profit-maximising condition of marginal cost being equal to “marginal receipts”, in his LSE lectures, 1927-29, as revealed by the notes taken by Nicholas Kaldor and Maurice Allen, and published in 1990 in the Journal of Economic Studies, 17, 3/4.

These lectures embellish what had already been published in the 4th edition (1926) of the top-selling textbook, Outlines of Economics, by R T Ely, Allyn Young, Thomas Adams and Max Lorenz (with Young being responsible for revising the chapters on Value and Price).

Young was Edward Chamberlin’s PhD supervisor at Harvard, and at the LSE he made reference (JES, p.53) to “Chamber’s [sic] about to be published book ‘Monop. Comp.’”. [Of course Chamberlin's book did not appear until a few years later, in 1933.]

In a letter to Young’s biographer, Charles Blitch, in 1973, Earl Hamilton wrote: “One thing that my notes taken [at Harvard] in 1924-1926 conclusively showed was that every worthwhile idea in E.H. Chamberlin’s subsequent work on imperfect competition had been clearly expounded by Allyn Young in class long before Chamberlin put pen to paper.” (See R.J. Sandilands, “New Evidence on Allyn Young’s Style and Influence as a Teacher”, Journal of Economic Studies, 26,6, 1999, p.469.)

- Roger Sandilands
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Robert Leeson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2015 12:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] imperfect competition in textbooks

If you can't access it I could send you a scan of the chapter. In brief: Stigler had a sophisticated understanding of knowledge construction and destruction - his plan was to drive monopolistic/imperfect competition 'deeper and deeper into the footnotes'.

This may reflect the influence of Ludwig 'von' Mises (1998 [1944], 18, 16):

“the tears [socialists] weep over the vanishing of competition are crocodile tears. The only fault they find in monopoly is that it is private monopoly and not government monopoly.” Imperfect Competition as developed by Joan Robinson (1933) was a “ruse ... Mrs Robinson is probably in her subconscious fully aware of the fallacies of her arguments. Otherwise she would not have advocated the German and Russian methods for the suppression of all criticism. No independent universities, learned societies, and publishing houses should be allowed to exist. One can agree with the lady that her doctrine could not survive except under these conditions. Mrs Robinson wants, moreover, in the same way to prevent the existence of independent churches, theatres, and philharmonic societies.”

*The Economist* review of *Anti-Capitalist Mentality* (“Liberalism in Caricature”, 13 April 1957) described Mises:

"as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard ... To find an equal dogmatism coupled with an equally simpliste view of the springs of conduct, an equal propensity for propping up dummies and knocking them down, an equal contempt for human facts coupled with an equally vituperative style, one would have to turn to the less sophisticated Marxists .... The case for freedom needs making and re-making, tirelessly and ingeniously; but its cause is ill served by such stuff as this.”


----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Boland" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, 21 March, 2015 12:00:28 AM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] imperfect competition in textbooks

Robert, can you give us a hint as to what that chapter says
regarding the two questions, please?

LB


On 20-Mar-15 5:30 AM, Robert Leeson wrote:
> There is a chapter on this (and Stigler's 'neglect is the highway to oblivion' response to imperfect competition) in
>
> Leeson, R. 2000. *The Eclipse of Keynesianism: The Political Economy of the Chicago Counter-Revolution*. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lawrence Boland" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Friday, 20 March, 2015 10:19:36 AM
> Subject: [SHOE] imperfect competition in textbooks
>
> I have a question that only historians of economics can answer.
>
> After Joan Robinson published her imperfect competition book
> in 1933, how long did it take for economics text books to
> add a chapter on imperfect competition? I have the fourth
> edition of Boulding's micro text and it has it but that one
> is rather late.
>
> Did this have to take until explicit micro vs. macro texts
> started to appear? So far we have only be able to put that
> in the late 1940s.
>
> LB
>


--
Lawrence A. Boland, FRSC
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby BC Canada V5A-1S6
phone: 778-782-4487, web: http://www.sfu.ca/~boland