==================== HES POSTING ====================== Roy Davidson wrote: > > It would be interesting to analyze the transition from <b>political > economy</b> to <b>economics</b> about the turn of the century. . . . > Could a gradual change in the definition of the discipline explain the > transition? Roy, I would answer your question yes, although the "discipline" itself nevertheless developed in various ways. Let me explain. One way to characterize the transition from "political economy" to "economics" is to say that those who made it believed that it was possible to construct a value-free science. The term "political economy" implied the making of value jugments, as if the goal of knowing about the economy was to make policy recommendations. The term "economics" did not have that connotation. This is pretty clear in Walras' Elements. But to return to the the U.S., Frank Fetter describes an "advance in thinking" of this type in his 1914 (mistaken) critique of Davenport.(Fetter, Frank A., "Davenport's Competitive Economics," Journal of Political Economy, June, 1914.) But what happened after professional economists, bye and large, purged value judgments from their "science?" Economics in the U.S. seems to have developed along two extremes. On the one extreme, economists sought to emulate natural science, with hypotheses expressed in precise mathematical terms and testable through statistical observation and even experimentation. Fisher and Mitchell were important catalysts. And then came Keynesianism and Samuelson. Along the other extreme, professional economists defined economics as a kind of logic of interaction based on the choice axiom (utility maximization and profit-maximization). In the early days Hawley, Fetter, and Davenport were promoters of this variant, albeit they disagreed with each other. As the latter extreme developed later, it seems to have become incorporated partly into the Chicago and Virginia (and UCLA) schools which, after Knight, were a mixture of a logic of choice and the positive-pragamatism suggested by the notion that economics is like a natural science. Professional economists (who were not fully enfatuated by the idea of emulating natural science) seem to have positioned themselves at various places along this continuum. But no consensus seems to have emerged, even today. The best example of the extreme logic of choice variant today is the Austrian school, some of whom seem to completely reject empiricism and mathematical modelling. If we could agree on an answer to the question "what is economics?," perhaps we would be in a better position to deal with the fundamental issue. But as we have discovered from past discussions on this list, everyone seems to have his own pet definition. This seems to reflect the developments that occurred in the profession; so I guess that it is understandable. In any case, insofar as the transition is concerned, I suspect that an acceptable way to describe it to modern economists is as a shift from normative to (a more) positive economics. Finally, it is interesting to observe that the _Journal of Political Economy_ retained its name through all this and that modern Public Choicers among others are beginning to use the term political economy again, even though at least many of them have no desire to return to "normative" economics. Then there are the Marxists, who never abandoned the term. - Pat Gunning http://www.showtower.com.tw/~gunning/welcome http://web.nchulc.edu.tw/~gunning/pat/welcome ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]