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[NOTE: Responses to the opening statement for this conference, or the
questions it raises are also welcome on the list. If there are responses,
I will start a new thread with the subject line "DISC -- Age of
Measurement". Conversation about some of these themes might help prompt
some more contributions to the conference! -- RBE]
THE AGE OF ECONOMIC MEASUREMENT
HOPE Conference, 2000
Guest Editors: Judy L. Klein and Mary S. Morgan
Since the late nineteenth century, measurement has been a integral part of
economics. The metrics of the discipline lend it credence as a science
while contemporary debates illustrate the political significance of
economic measurement (for examples, the 1996-97 US Congressional hearings
on the Consumer Price Index, the symposium on measurement in the winter
1998 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the recent
attempts by the United Nations to construct a "Human Development Index").
The History of Political Economy conference in the year 2000 will explore
the origins of economic measurement and the historical links between such
empirical observation and issues of public policy, changes in economic
theory and academic practice. There are no geographical boundaries to our
proposed exploration, but we imagine that most of the papers will
concentrate on the time period from 1850 to 1950, which could well be
labelled the "age of measurement in economics."
While historians of statistics such as Hacking (1983) have commented on
the "avalanche of numbers" which appeared in the 1820- 40 period, that
sudden desire to collect statistics seems to have focused more on the
social elements of the state and of individual deviancy than on economic
magnitudes. The census of population, of course, is the most obvious
manifestation, but the fascination with suicide, murder, prostitution and
ill health (all noted by Hacking) seemed to form the bulk of social
measurement of the period. Despite the interests of economists in joining
emerging statistical societies in the 19th century, economic measurement
seems to have only reached the same kind of avalanche proportions during
the last quarter of the century, when policy makers and economists began
to think that economic measurement was a pre-requisite to both scientific
knowledge and to reform of the body-economic.
During the last part of the nineteenth century, we see economists
seriously engaged with questions of how to provide measurements to match
their concepts, (eg the price level); with the development of appropriate
measurement formulae (eg index numbers); as well as with questions of
collection and categorization of data in ways which accurately describe
the economy and reveal its problems (eg business cycles). In the early
20th century, we begin to see monographs of measurements and about
measurement techniques. Thus, way before econometricians' attempts to
measure relationships became widespread, it had become commonplace for
economists to describe the economy in numbers by taking and using
measurements.
But economists weren't the only ones to become obsessed with measurement
in the later 19th century. Kelvin's dictum: "If you cannot measure, your
knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory" seems to be widely indicative of
the move towards exact and standardized measurements in the physical
sciences during that period (see Wise, 1995). It was not that
quantification was new, either in the sciences, as evidenced by historians
work on 18th century quantification (Frangsmyr et al, 1990), or in the
socio-economic realm (as discussed by Kula, 1986). Rather, it seems that,
only in the last quarter of the century, did accurate description of the
economy and measurement of the objects/elements in economic theory become
an essential part of the economic scientist's toolbox.
Despite the importance of this topic, the age of economic measurement has
received remarkably little attention from historians of economics. The
aim of the conference, and the subsequent special issue of History of
Political Economy, is to account for the emergence and establishment of
economic measurement as a critical element of modern economics. Our
research conference therefore invites contributions that analyze the
history of attempts to provide a measurement basis to economics as well as
papers offering explanations for the general drive to measure that we have
noted above. We need to lay out the main path of this age of economic
measurement, both in general and in detail, just as much as we need to
delve into the reasons for this movement towards measurement, its
implications for economics, and the changes it wrought. We would like to
understand what questions and problems created the drive to measurement
and how economists reacted to the changing status of numbers in their
discipline.
Conference questions and subthemes
There are a number of questions that we suggest might be addressed in
papers for the workshop:
1) What has constituted measurement in economics? Do numbers have to be
involved or have representations (eg maps or graphs) also counted as
measurements? For example, does William Playfair's 1804 chart of
Universal Commercial History constitute measurement of national economic
strength? Are Griffith Taylor's early twentieth century time-space
economic geography diagrams measurements? Do the results of late-twentieth
century computer simulations that test economic models overcome
accusations of theory without measurement any more than Ricardo's
hypothetical calculations? How has the notion of measurement and what
counts as measurement changed over time? How have methods of representing
measurements altered over time? One of the trends that has been
well-documented in the history of statistics and econometrics literature
is the gradual trend in economics from measuring things, without analysis
or attribution of causes, towards measuring relations and establishing
explanations. Indeed, we could reasonably ask the historical question:
Has econometrics always been about observation not about testing (as Kevin
Hoover (1994) claims for modern econometrics)? Although our conference is
not primarily concerned with the history of econometrics, we are very much
interested in accounts of this growth in ambition in the measurement
movement.
2) How do the histories of the other standard elements of economics:
models, theories, evidence etc relate to the history of economic
measurement? What is the role of measurement in the relationships between
abstract and empirical reasoning? In 1929, at an AEA workshop on
quantitative economics, Eveline Burns asserted that "the proper attitude
for those of us who are primarily theorists is to ask in what possible
ways our view of the economic world and the theories we have built up to
account for it are influenced by the methods and results of the
quantitative workers." What were the links between the theorists and the
quantitative workers? For example, how did contemporary theoretical
discussions about national wealth influence attempts to measure that
wealth from Playfair's "linear arithmetic"in the late eighteenth century to
Michael Mulhall's and Ezra Seaman's measurements of national progress and
productivity in the nineteenth century to Kuznet's national income
accounting in the twentieth century? Did the "demands of the speculative
theorist far outrun the lagging pace of observation" as Frederick Mills
argued?
3) How does the history of statistics relate to the history of economic
measurement? While there has been work on economic measurements within the
history of statistics, and considerable historical discussion of social
measurement at the end of the 19th century, more work needs to be done to
illuminate the relation of such measurement strategies to the measurement
drive in the history of economics. This subtheme can also be interpreted
as a question of scientific interaction: What are the relations between
economic and social measurement strategies, between the examples provided
by physical measurement and those in the economic realm and vice versa?
Jevons and Edgeworth, for example saw economists' attempts to codify and
measure utility as comparable to the probabilists' attempts to measure
doubt and belief. To what extent, and in what ways, did concerns with
measurement in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries function to
forge a link between disciplines, such as the biometric link in the
adoption of statistical methods?
4) What are the cultural, social, and political contexts within which
measurement takes place? Why, for example, was the measurement of the
distribution of income and wealth so important to Italian economists in
the late nineteenth century? What economic statistics were conceptualized
by wartime states or central planning authorities? Are there useful
comparisons to be made between, for example, RAND economists equating
pilots and planes in the measurement of military worth for resource
allocation in the Cold War and William Petty's equation of land and people
for the political arithmetic of colonial fiscal policy? Why, for example,
were Nikolai Kondratiev's construction of peasant indices or the
measurement of the terms of trade for agriculture so threatening to the
Soviet government in the 1920s?
5) Context and content are interdependent - measurements are used in
policy purposes and policy purposes encourage measurement. Does this
explain why some things get measured and others not? This subtheme
therefore invites us to consider: What are the feedback loops between
policy, measurement, and theory? How have the loops changed in form over
time or subject? Is measurement a first step in policy control? This
applies most obviously to war-time developments in economic measurement.
But the question may also apply more widely. J. R. Hicks argued that
monetary theory was stimulated by events, particularly major disturbances.
Thomas Humphrey (1973) of the Richmond Federal Reserve argues that Hicks's
conjecture also applies to empirical research on money and credit flows.
For example much of the research effort of the American monetarists in the
1920's was devoted to the search for the perfect price index with which to
fit the quantity theory for stabilization purposes.
6) The questions of context can also be interpreted narrowly to cover the
nature of social circles within which measurement aims and practices are
constituted and carry across scientific and social borders. On the one
hand this invites us to consider the role of learned societies (e.g.
Manchester Statistical Society and their periodic analysis of credit
flows) as the centre in a measurement network. We might also consider
seriously the role of measurement posts or non-state data recorders: the
institutions (eg banks, financial journals, business cycle institutes,
government agencies etc.) which record information for their own reasons
and whose data then become our economic measurements for scientific
purposes. What are the historical interactions between economic
measurements used in commercial, political and scientific arithmetic? On
the other hand this sub-theme also suggests we pose detailed questions
about the nature of training in measurement within economics; about the
history of practices of measurement and their assimilation; about the
differentiation of measurements and their place and role within economic
disputes. This subtheme also invites us to consider the role of borrowing
of measurement structures within and between sub-fields in economics (for
example, the gradual expansion of index number formulae to the measurement
of different economic objects; or questions regarding when and why
measurement became a necessary condition for the construction of economic
history?)
7) How is the movement towards measurement placed within the economic
ideas of the period? This internalist question relates both to the
changes over time within economics and the relative effects of those, as
well as the differences between national preferences and "schools of
thought" within economics. For example, the commitment to measurement
within both historical and (certain parts of the) institutionalist schools
entails a different kind of view of measurement than is supposed to be
associated with the utility thinking of the marginalist approach. Some
might argue that the latter is a query about measurability not
measurement. To what extent did divisions over measurement projects lie
behind the split between economic historians and neoclassical economists?
How do these varied notions of measurement and its role fit with changing
and contested notions of what constituted good economic science? In
general: How have economists understood scientific objectivity in relation
to measurement?
8) There are clearly some critical methodological questions in economic
measurement not least because creating a good correspondence between
measurements and economic concepts is often problematic (for example the
problem of utility, or the problem of measuring non-market aspects in
GNP). At the same time there are problems with getting good accurate
measurements, even where the concept is one which is measurable: this
leads to standard measuring devices which are often regarded as best
proxies rather than good measures (the example of index numbers of cost
and standard of living). How do such questions of measurement get resolved
and such practices of measurement get standardised in the history of
economics? What has been involved in establishing acceptable measurements
for things and processes that have tended to be only accessible by
indirect means (eg business cycles)? How do some of the philosophies of
science of the period - eg pragmatism, operationalism, positivism etc.
relate to the age of measurement in its various manifestations?
9) The rhetoric of measurement has been considered by McCloskey (1985) in
a well-known attack on econometrics, and by Porter in a discussion of the
role of economic numbers in relation to expertise (1995); but a history of
the ways that economic measurement has been used in economic discourse
over the period, of its rise and establishment, its ability to persuade
and to structure our ways of talking in economics remains an interesting
project.
10) What account can we give of the changing technologies of measurement?
In what ways were the technologies for collecting and analyzing
descriptive statistics used in the past different from those now used to
provide data for simulation and computational experiments? How are our
statistics related to our computational hardware and our algorithmic
software? To what extent have measurement technologies and computational
resources been a limit to measurement or a stimulus to innovation in
measurement and to model construction as a substitute?
References:
Fransmyr, T. J.L. Heilbron and R.E. Rider (1990) The Quantifying Spirit in
the Eighteenth Century (University of California Press).
Hacking, I. (1983) The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press).
Hoover, K. (1994) "Econometrics as Observation: The Lucas Critique and the
Nature of Econometric Inference" Journal of Economic Methodology 1(1),
65-80.
Humphrey, T. (1973) "Empirical Tests of the Quantity Theory of Money in
the United States, 1900-1930" History of Political Economy, 5, 285-316.
Kula, W. (1986) Measures and Men (translated by R. Szreter) (Princeton
University Press).
McCloskey, D.N. (1985) "The Loss Function has been Mislaid: The Rhetoric
of Significance Tests" American Economic Review, 75(2), 201-205.
Porter, T.H. (1995) Trust in Numbers (Princeton University Press). Wise,
N.M. (1995) The Values of Precision (Princeton University Press).
THE AGE OF ECONOMIC MEASUREMENT: CALL FOR PAPERS
All proposals for contributions to the workshop (in March/April 2000) and
subsequent consideration for publication in the special issue of History
of Political Economy (in year 2001) are most welcome. The general topic
to be addressed: "The Age of Measurement in Economics" is outlined above,
along with suggested sub-themes. Of course, proposals which extend our
themes are also welcomed. No doubt the history of measurement of specific
concepts (e.g. wealth, inequality of income distribution, concentration
ratios) or specific processes (cycles) would throw light on many of the
above questions, but we expect that proposals of this type would not be
entirely descriptive in intent, rather that they will relate to some of
the questions outlined above.
Please send immediate expressions of interest, followed by one page
outline proposals by 1st May 1999, to both the organisers:
Judy L. Klein (at Department of Economics, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton,
VA 24401, USA. Phone: 1-540-887-7053 Fax: 1-540-887-7137 email:
[log in to unmask])
Mary Morgan (at Department of Economic History, London School of
Economics, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE, UK. Phone 44-171-955- 7081; Fax
44-171-955-7730; email: [log in to unmask]).
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