I don't have precise numbers but I did interview both Lorie and Paul, and both agreed that Lorie's book received much greater attack than Paul's.  I think Lorie said that sales fell by 90%.  The interviews can be found in my The Coming of Keynesianism to America. While this information is based on their memories, which can be flawed, there seemed to be general agreement among all the old Keynesians I interviewed about what happened.  I also held a seminar workshop on the topic, and all remembered it the same way.  So I think Roger’s charge of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” is a bit strong.

A 90% drop in sales in one year is substantial. Such a drop would generally require much more than a new book to bring it about. I believe the market size was increasing then, so not increasing sales would be even more unusual.

Roger’s statement that Samuelson’s book is “more institutional and less theoretical” than Lorie’s is quite inconsistent with my remembrance of the books.  As I remember them, Paul’s was the more theoretical book—it was a significant revision of the way economics was presented—it  separated micro and macro in a quite different way than earlier. It embedded a Walrasian view of economic theory into the texts. It was much more consistent with Lerner’s “Economics of Control” sense of policy, which made the policy follow from the model, than earlier books.  As I remember Paul’s book was written for MIT students—or at least Paul had been given a semester off to write a book that would be appropriate for them—so it would be quite surprising if it was less theoretical and more institutional than Lorie’s book.  Roger, what is your reasoning here—what would make Paul’s book more institutional and less theoretical?)  As I remember, Lorie’s book was quite different—it was a narrative that blended theory and policy in a way much more consistent with how previous books did.  That’s why Paul’s book was seen as, and was, such a game changer.

The fact that the books were different in style works against Roger’s interpretation of professors simply replacing Lorie’s book with Paul’s.  It wasn’t just replacing one book with another that was almost identical—it was replacing an old style book with a new style book. Such style changes are not done overnight, because it violates the 15% rule for textbooks. For new adopters it means changing notes and presentations. That would likely be done slowly, and would take a couple of editions to take place. The two books were not close substitutes as are many of today’s texts. (It would be a bit like people switching from Samuelson to Robinson and Eatwell, or to Phelps, which were two books that deviated from the Samuelson template that didn’t make it.)  In my papers on the evolution of U.S. texts that I mentioned in the last email, I discuss that older style and how Samuelson changed it.

I’d have to see the survey that Roger mentions in the 1950s as support for his views. (Roger, do you have a citation? Is it for all texts or for economic texts?) Without having seen it, I wouldn’t expect much useful information from anything but a highly in-depth survey, done by someone who understands the nuances of pressure.  These issues of political pressure about policy views involve enormous subtlety. This was the McCarthy period, and in academics these issues were often done with a wink and a nod—like the limitations on the number of Jews teaching at a school at the time.  Seldom is the pressure done overtly in a way that can be traced to a specific person. A letter comes to the president from a major donor, or major potential donor, asking what book is used in teaching economics at the school, because they heard that communistic ideas were being taught.  The president asks the econ department, but does not say they have to change.  But the pressure to change is there.  The pressure happens all the time—although it is often on the other political side now.

For some reason Lorie was attacked. Although he didn’t know about it at the time, there was a strong push to have him fired from Stanford where he was teaching, and it was only because the Stanford President stood firm that he wasn’t.  He had been part of the Harvard-Tufts Keynesians who pushed for policy change. Paul wasn’t part of that group, and was really quite separate from the Keynesian political movement at the time.  So one would expect far less pressure against him.

Roger would have to provide some strong evidence to lead me to accept his view that it was Samuelson’s book, not political pressure, which led to Lorie’s book sales dropping so precipitously.

In terms of Samuelson changing his views to reflect political pressure, the issues are, in my view, far more complicated than can be found in specific changes in Paul’s text. As a textbook author, (my principles book is now in its 9th edition.) I would not expect to find many, if any, changes that any college text author made due to direct political pressures. (I would expect to find such changes in K-12 texts, which have a different sales model.)  We college text authors have academic freedom to write what we want, and we pride ourselves in not submitting to political pressure.)  That said, political, cultural and social pressure is there operating in the background. After all to stay around textbooks have to sell.  The changes take place in the conception of the book, and in the editing and reviewing process—one gets reviews saying that certain things are liked and others are not, and changes to those that are liked. It is all quite nuanced, and if you are looking for it on the surface, you are unlikely to see it.

Lorie was not very nuanced in his support of Keynesianism—he wrote about policy, and his political views were clear from the writing.  Samuelson presented economics more in a model form—emphasizing Lerner’s interpretation of Keynes, not other less model focused interpretations.  It allows economists to teach the model, and avoid the nuance of interpretation.  The political views were still there, but they are deeply embedded in the model and in the frame, not put out there for all to see and attack.

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From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Roger Backhouse [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2014 3:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Early 20th Century Principles of Economics Texts

Dave's account of the demise of the Tarshis textbook is often encountered but I would like to see some evidence for it other than post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Tarshis was published in 1947, sold well, and was immediately attacked. Though I have not seen sales figures, my understanding is that sales plummeted very quickly. However, was this because of the attacks, or because of the appearance of Samuelson's textbook in 1948? Samuelson's argument is that the books were only slightly different, therefore it must have been the attacks, but I do not buy this for two reasons. (a) It is Samuelson's way of being modest and I would conjecture that for many instructors his was a much better book because it was more institutional and less theoretical. (b) It only takes a marginal difference for people to switch from one to the other.

Further evidence is that someone did a survey in the early 1950s, and when teachers in dozens of universities were asked whether they knew of any institution where a textbook had been changed because of external pressure, no-one gave any examples. People might have an incentive to deny that their own institution had responded to political pressure, but would they not report what they had heard about other places? Hence in the absence of further evidence, I remain skeptical about whether it was political pressure that killed the Tarshis book.

The issue of how far textbooks did get modified in response to political pressure is also a difficult one on which to find hard evidence, because it can be difficult to disentangle outside pressure from the authors' own views. In due course, I hope to be able to say something more concrete about the successive editions of Samuelson, but at the moment all I can say is that I see no evidence that pressure caused him to change the way he wrote the first edition (which was attacked before publication). Where critics pointed to specific passages, he made changes that can quite easily be seen as improvements to the language that did not change the message.

On Dan Hirschman's question, I think the answer is that there is no comprehensive source (other than those Dave mentions). However, Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (vol 4 p. 664 and vol 5 p. 211) contains some sales figures. Daniel Macmillan (Economic Journal 1942) gives sales figures for Marshall's Principles. These figures are discussed in "The reception of Marshall in the United States" (Backhouse, Bateman and Medema) in The Impact of Alfred Marshall's Ideas (ed Raffaelli et al, Elgar 2010). Steve Medema and I also tried to find every textbook we could (after 1932) for our paper on the spread of the Robbins definition (Economica 2009) so you might find it useful to check the bibliography in that paper in that in case it has textbooks you have missed.

The other suggestion is to browse the book review sections of academic journals, because in this period Principles texts did get reviewed in places such as the AER and EJ.

Roger

[cid:part1.09020108.04010504@bham.ac.uk]
Colander, David C.<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
18 December 2014 00:53
Marco Guidi did an entire study of texts around the world. looked at the evolutions of US textbooks to the 1930s in:

“The Evolution of US Textbooks” in The Economic Reader: Textbooks, Manuals and the Dissemination of the Economic Sciences during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. (Massimo Augello and Marco Guidi, editors). Routledge, 2012.

“What We Taught and what we did: The Evolution of US Economic Textbooks (1830-1930)” Il Pensiero Economico Italiano XIV 2006

In “God, Man, and Lorie Tarshis at Yale” , in Omar Hamuda (ed.) Keynesianism and the Keynesian Revolution in America, Edward Elgar, 1998, Harry Landreth and I look at Lorie's book which was the first Keynesian book in the US--it got attacked by the Veritas Society and W. Buckley and its sales died--Samuelson was also attacked but less so. We argue that those attacks played an important role in the scientific framing of economics in the Samuelson and post Samuelson texts.

Dave



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From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] on behalf of Dan Hirschman [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 3:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [SHOE] Early 20th Century Principles of Economics Texts

Dear SHOE,

I'm working on an analysis of introductory economics textbooks published in the United States between about 1890 and 1950 (the period between Marshall and Samuelson, roughly). I've accumulated an ad hoc collection of texts based on the holdings of my library and scattered references in the secondary literature (Elzinga 1992, Walstad et al 1998, and Giraud 2013 in particular), but I was hoping that there might be some more systematic way to generate a universe of texts from which to sample. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good source that discusses principles texts in this period, perhaps with information on relative influence (number of editions, course adoptions, or sales)? Does such a source exist?

Thanks very much!
Dan Hirschman
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan
.

[cid:part1.09020108.04010504@bham.ac.uk]
Dan Hirschman<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
17 December 2014 20:20
Dear SHOE,

I'm working on an analysis of introductory economics textbooks published in the United States between about 1890 and 1950 (the period between Marshall and Samuelson, roughly). I've accumulated an ad hoc collection of texts based on the holdings of my library and scattered references in the secondary literature (Elzinga 1992, Walstad et al 1998, and Giraud 2013 in particular), but I was hoping that there might be some more systematic way to generate a universe of texts from which to sample. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good source that discusses principles texts in this period, perhaps with information on relative influence (number of editions, course adoptions, or sales)? Does such a source exist?

Thanks very much!
Dan Hirschman
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan