JBR, I'm one of those who assumed, probably from Samuelson's 3rd (which dates me pretty precisely), that Giffen was concerned with Ireland and potatoes.  Thanks for steering me right.  I'm a little surprised that rice would be a Giffen good even though I should confess that my surprise is based on my experience of India, where rice is a luxury grain; there the inferior grains, which seem to me better candidates for Giffen status, are coarse grains like millet.  Steve Marglin

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Wicksell and Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Steve,
     I agree that the correct formulation is to say that suppliers endogenously adjust quantity supplied in response to exogenous shocks, although when the exogenous shock is climate to agriculture, a major concern of Marshall's, then the exogenous shock is acting directly on supply irrespective of behavior of the farmers.  Again, I note that Marshall was very much concerned with the social welfare implications of the price of bread.  Indeed, the term "Giffen good" entered economic discussion due to Major Giffen testifying to a commission in the 1890s about the price of bread, which Marshall was very interested in.  The testimony amounted to arguing that bread was inferior good, not a Giffen good.  It appears that how many came to think that somehow Giffen was talking about the Irish potato famine is due to people misinterpreting as discussion by Samuelson in one of the early editions of his Principles textbook, I think the third edition but stand to be corrected on that if I am wrong, in which he laid out how we now think of a Giffen good (for which inferiority is a necessary but not sufficient condition), and then threw out a comment that Irish potatoes during the famine might be an example.  He did not tie Giffen to that example, but many others did , which then got widely repeated until it is now incorrect folk wisdom that Giffen studied the Irish potato famine.  BTW, Irish potatoes were almost certainly inferior, but not necessarily Giffen, although we are now reasonably certain that rice in China may have been truly Giffen at some points in time and location for certain price-quantity ranges.


-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marglin, Stephen
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 1:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Wicksell and Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Professor Rosser, 

Perhaps there is more to Marshall's choice of independent variable than exogenous supply shocks.  As I read Marshall, the adjustment to equilibrium hinges on suppliers adjusting output, an endogenous process rather than an exogenous shock.  (As in his fish market example.)  By contrast, I read Walras as positing an adjustment process that hinges on suppliers changing prices.  (At least in his simple example in the beginning of The Elements.  Later on, with production in the picture, he seems to move more in the direction of Marshall in allowing for producers to change quantities as well as prices.)  

The irony is that over the 20th century the profession has adopted Walras's dynamics while preserving Marshall's orientation of the axes, which--if they stopped to think about it-- would jar the mathematical sensibilities of students accustomed in other applications of analytic geometry and calculus to plotting the independent variable on the horizontal axis and the dependent variable on the vertical axis.

Am I wrong?

Steve Marglin

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 5:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Wicksell and Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Tom,
    Of course regarding the matter of the basic supply and demand diagram, yes, Cournot was first, but he had the axes switched from the standard Marshallian formulation.  It was Rau who first did it the way Marshall did, as did Jenkin.  The French tradition continued to follow Cournot for a long time, most notably with Walras.
    Curiously, when we talk about it we present it as if it should done as Cournot and his followers did so, with classroom presentations almost always taking about what happens after price changes.  It is a sign of a sharp student who asks, "If price is the variable changing and quantity is responding, why do we have price on the vertical axis?"  Needless to say, most here know the answer, which is that Marshall was focused on agricultural markets, particularly the wheat one that led to the bread one, still fundamental for social welfare in UK late 19th century, and in such markets exogenous forces, notably the weather, impacting supply are a regular driving force, although he also  was well aware of the work of both Rau and Jenkin reportedly.
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Thomas Humphrey [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 7:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] Wicksell and Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Re: Knut Wicksell and his cumulative process analysis. It occurs to me that what economists call the "Wicksellian cumulative process" is a perfect example of the operation of Stigler's Law of Eponymy according to which "No scientific discovery is named for its original discoverer."

For as James Ahiakpor and others have shown in these posts, 18th and 19th century classical economists including Hume, Smith, Thornton, Ricardo, Joplin, and others had assembled and put together elements of the cumulative process model long before Wicksell did so in his 1898 Interest and Prices. Those classicals were the original discoverers of the cumulative process analysis. Yet today we refer to the model as the Wicksellian cumulative process rather than as the Hume-Thornton- Ricardo-Joplin cumulative process.

Why? Because it was Wicksell more than his classical predecessors who made the model sing and who put it on the map. It was Wicksell's formulation that was most instrumental in influencing economists to accept the model as a valid depiction of the process of price-level change. For that reason, Wicksell gets the honor of having the model bear his name. Stigler's Law.

The same thing happened with the ordinary microeconomic demand-and- supply curve diagram, which today bears the label "the Marshallian Cross" after Alfred Marshall. But it wasn't Marshall who discovered the diagram. Rather A. A. Cournot was its original discoverer in his
1838 Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth. And after Cournot but before Marshall, at least four economists including Karl Rau, Jules Dupuit, Hans von Mangoldt, and Fleeming Jenkin presented the diagram, often in quite elaborate and sophisticated forms. Yet today we honor Marshall, not his forerunners, by naming the diagram after him.

Why? Because it was Marshall who in his 1890 Principles of Economics made the diagram sing and who put it on the map. It was his version that caught the attention of the entire economics profession.
Stigler's Law again.