I suggest that people who believe that the invisible hand also distributes private funding for research "efficiently" and “blindly”, perhaps even reaching some kind of maximum, watch “Inside Job”, an extremely interesting film, made in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, in particular its Section IV (“Accountability”), where the problem of private research funding for economic research receives some attention and some of the most prominent US economists make an embarassing appearance.

Giancarlo de Vivo


 
> Il giorno 20/giu/2017, alle ore 00:30, R. W. Dimand <[log in to unmask]> ha scritto:
> 
> Which is more likely: that the people running the Laura Spellman Rockefeller 
> Fund had ever heard of Nassau Senior and demanded the reprinting of
> his works as a condition for funding LSE, or, alternatively, that LSE economist
> Marian Bowley (and her father, LSE professor A. L. Bowley) were interested
> in Nassau Senior because Nassau Senior was the subject of Marian Bowley's
> doctoral dissertation and first book?
> 
> Robert Dimand
> ________________________________________
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Giancarlo de Vivo [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: June 19, 2017 3:18 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [SHOE] LSE series of reprints of scarce works on political economy
> 
> Of course Mason is right: who would deny that leaving most of the funding for research into private hands brings results which in one way or another reflect the maxim: who pays the piper calls the tune? Dear Robert Dimand, this applies also to the funding for scarce reprints: have you noticed that the author most reprinted in the LSE series is a vulgar sycophant like Senior? Perhaps some Rockefeller money went into this?
> 
> Giancarlo de Vivo
> 
> 
>> Il giorno 19/giu/2017, alle ore 18:58, Mason Gaffney <[log in to unmask]> ha scritto:
>> 
>> Dear Rob et al.,
>>      Yes, I agree that any brief statement of a complex issue risks
>> overstating OR UNDERSTATING its point. I only want to raise consciousness of
>> how the tentacles of well-funded octopi may direct or misdirect the work of
>> "objective, scientific" scholars.  At age 94, I speak from long experience,
>> some of it published.
>> 
>> Mason
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> Behalf Of Rob Tye
>> Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2017 1:56 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [SHOE] LSE series of reprints of scarce works on political
>> economy
>> 
>> Dear Mason,
>> 
>> MG >  Please consider also the possibility that the Rocks financed LSE not
>> to promote Fabianism but to subvert it.  They were a shrewd and canny lot
>> 
>> I suspect you would agree that this brief statement risks overemphasising
>> the degree of intentionally involved?  What I seem to see is more like a
>> great deal of rather random surface activity, but with a constant underlying
>> attitudinal drift applied to it.
>> 
>> I think its worth my saying a little more - as a non-economist - because it
>> seems to me that most published work on the long term history of economics
>> is not and never has been done by economists - but rather by historians,
>> anthropologists and archaeologists.  And that the Rockefeller funding in the
>> 1920's (London from 1923, Paris from 1926 (?), New York about the same time
>> (?)) seems to me to be crucial to an understanding how Economic Departments
>> were bypassed, in leading the way to the somewhat centrally co-ordinated
>> historicist errors concerning economic history of the 1960's (I am thinking
>> especially of the enormous and regrettable influence of historians Fernand
>> Braudel and Moses Finley).
>> 
>> Just as I fail to find the history of economics being pursued within
>> academic Economics Departments, so too the history of this history seems to
>> be written by others.  I was particularly impressed by the early work of
>> Jeff Pooley ('An Accident of Memory') on the intellectual development of
>> Edward Shils, and the rather notorious Paul Lazarsfeld - but carried out
>> under the umbrella of Media Studies.  It seems particularly relevant here,
>> since Shils developed his intellectual stance in connection with
>> philosophical matters whilst at LSE, and seems a crucial figure as the baton
>> was passed from Rockefeller to Ford.
>> 
>> If there are insightful 20th century historiological sources I have
>> overlooked, I would be very please to get them
>> 
>> Robert Tye
>> 
>> PS I use "historicism" in the broad 'Hegelian' sense, of course.
>> 
>