===================== HES POSTING ================= The Economists' Papers Project at Duke University -- A Sample from the Don Patinkin Papers Stephen Meardon Duke University and Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, A.C. [log in to unmask] Previous contributions to this editorials list have argued for writing the history of economics with a more sociological or more contextual approach; a genuine "historical study" as opposed to an extended "review essay." James Henderson urges us to consider that "economic knowledge is created in real time" -- and with this in mind, to use research materials that may reflect knowledge creation better than the obvious primary sources. Roy Weintraub awaits the day when "writing and research in the history of economic thought will increasingly approach the standards of historical writing in the history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history of medicine." A likely way to reach these ends is to dig through archives, the unpublished personal and professional papers of individuals and institutions. But to do so requires familiarity with details of the relevant archives: their locations, their contents, and a very concrete idea of how they can be used to thicken one's research. The purpose of this editorial is to provide some of these details for one large archive in particular: the Economists' Papers Project at Duke University. In an attempt to achieve the purpose with a bit of flair, a small selection from the archive -- a 1957-58 correspondence between Don Patinkin and John Hicks, drawn from the Patinkin papers -- has been scanned for access on the world wide web. Its historical relevance is explained below. The following draws partly from joint work with Roy Weintraub, Ted Gayer, and Spencer Banzhaf, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature. Contents of the Duke Archive The Economists' Papers Project was initiated in the early 1980's by Craufurd Goodwin, Neil de Marchi, and E. Roy Weintraub of Duke's Department of Economics, and Special Collections Librarian Robert Byrd. Its purpose is to collect at one site valuable and otherwise scattered archive materials, relating primarily to the 20th century history of economics, in order to make these materials more accessible to researchers. In earlier years this required a lengthy process of introducing the Project to potential donors and persuading them of the advantages of donating the papers to Duke -- rather than, in most cases, the university where the economist was tenured. It was argued that Duke was one of the few universities with the facilities, the will, and the interest among faculty and graduate students to preserve the papers and ensure they would be used. However after several years of building the archive it can now sell itself by virtue of its scale: the growing number of collections attracts ever larger numbers of researchers to the Duke Special Collections Library, where, as originally hoped, they may find useful more than just one of the collections. The historian of game theory studying Morgenstern may also be interested in Shubik; the historian of the "Chicago School" may want to look through the papers of Griliches, Rees, Lewis, Jones, Patinkin, Bronfenbrenner, and Hamilton. The archive now includes the twenty-seven collections listed in the table below, with several more committed. Collections Received (size of collection in linear feet) Arrow, Kenneth J. (55.5) Baumol, William J. (46.5) Bloomfield, Arthur I. (12.0) Bronfenbrenner, Martin (21.0) Clower, Robert (6.0) Domar, Evsey D. (33.0) Fetter, Frank W. (114.0) Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (36.2) Griliches, Zvi (12.0) Hamilton, Earl (29.9) Hildreth, Clifford (1.5) Hoover, Calvin B. (43.0) Jones, Homer (1.5) Lewis, H. Gregg (21.2) Menger, Carl (10.0) Menger, Karl (39.0) Metzler, Llyod (14.0) Morgenstern, Oskar (30.0) North, Douglass C. (1.1) Patinkin, Don (121.5) Perlman, Mark (54.0) Rees, Albert E. (10.5) Shubik, Martin (15.0) Smith, Vernon L. (28.5) Spengler, Joseph (88.4) Stolper, Wolfgang (6.0) Weintraub, Sidney (10.0) The size of the collections vary. The Douglass North papers consist of less than one standard file box of material; the Don Patinkin papers fill eighty. The contents of collections are similarly variable. They may consist of correspondence, lecture notes (taken while student or produced as teacher), data, documents, and more sensitive materials: referee's reports, tenure evaluations, and so on. Even a rough sketch of each of the collections would be quite lengthy -- so that will be left to the Economists' Papers Project website at the Duke Special Collections Library, where detailed descriptions and box lists are either already available or will soon be so. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/economists/ Nevertheless at least some idea of the archive's rich and variable contents can be provided by citing examples from each of several types of material. Student Notes and Lecture Notes: The Kenneth Arrow Papers contain the notes he took as a student at City College of New York and Columbia University, and the notes and syllabi for courses he later taught on Price and Allocation Theory, The Theory of Competitive Equilibrium, and The Theory of Information and Organization. Data: The Earl Hamilton papers contain notes and data relating to Spanish economic history, which he used to write "Wages on Spanish Warships, 1503-1660" (JPE, 1929) and other papers. The Zvi Griliches papers contain a large amount of data and graphs on acres planted and yields of hybrid corn in the mid-west in the 1920's and 30's. He used this data to write his Ph.D. thesis, and it was the starting block for his work on technological change. Manuscripts: The Martin Shubik papers contain drafts of his Game Theory in the Social Sciences, a project originally begun with Lloyd Shapley. Diaries: The Oskar Morgenstern papers contain a diary he kept nearly continuously from his student days until his death, which records the process of collaboration with John von Neumann as well as his own political shifts in his Vienna days. It also provides a unique glimpse of his remarkable friendships with Albert Einstein and Kurt Goedel at Princeton. Referees' reports: As associate editor of Econometrica, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen was involved in both soliciting and writing referee's reports for that journal. He coordinated the refereeing process of Arrow and Debreu's "Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy," of which the reports and related correspondence offer a fascinating view of the process by which a seminal proof was accepted by the economics profession (Gayer and Weintraub, 1998; Gayer, 1997). Administrative letters and documents: The papers of Mark Perlman, founder and editor from 1969 to 1981 of the Journal of Economic Literature, contains ten boxes of correspondence pertaining to administration of the JEL. Such documents can provide evidence for researchers in the sociology and economics of the economics profession. Other Documents: The Arrow papers include material related to his roles as consultant (to the National Research Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) and political advocate (for Senator Al Gore, arms control, Middle East peace, and human rights). The Karl Menger papers are a treasure trove of material on the life of the mathematical community in Central Europe in the inter-war years, and the attempts to link Austrian economics and mathematics in the Mengerkreis (and related Vienna Circle) of the pre-Anschluss period. Correspondence: The Patinkin papers, the largest collection, is richest in its correspondence. Fully forty-four of the eighty boxes contain correspondence. Patinkin was a meticulous record-keeper, so the files contain copies of the letters he wrote as well as those he received. They are from every year of his professional career and involve almost every colleague: Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, Roy Harrod, Harry Johnson, Simon Kuznets, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson, among literally hundreds of others. The Archive as Research Material: An Illustration from the "Last Skirmish" of "Keynes and the Classics", by way of the Don Patinkin Papers Having taken a very quick and broad view of the whole archive, we'll now pull from it a single file for closer examination. Reproducing a few specific documents on the world wide web and discussing their contents may aide this introduction of Duke's Economists' Papers Project -- providing the "very concrete example" mentioned earlier of its usefulness in historical research in economics. (See http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/economists/patinkin/ for copies of the correspondence identified below.) The file is from Box 25 of the "Correspondence" series of the Patinkin papers. It contains a number of letters between Patinkin and John Hicks, dated between July 1957 and January 1958. Their correspondence thus took place after the publication of Patinkin's 1956 Money, Interest, and Prices (MIP) and Hicks's 1957 review of MIP for the Economic Journal ("A Rehabilitation of Classical Economics?"), but before Patinkin's 1959 rejoinder ("Keynesian Economics Rehabilitated"). Leijonhufvud (1969, p.17) designated the latter two articles the "last skirmish" of the "Keynes and the Classics" debate. An interpretation of this "last skirmish" based solely upon the articles themselves would probably not be very charitable to Hicks. It might run as follows: in MIP Patinkin showed that if real money balances affect consumption and saving decisions, and unemployment causes prices to fall, then real balances will rise, the IS curve will shift outward, and unemployment will be eliminated -- at least in long-run static equilibrium. In his 1957 review Hicks claimed Patinkin had not considered carefully the liquidity trap, which may indeed cause unemployment to persist in static equilibrium; Hicks illustrated his argument diagrammatically without a shifting IS curve. In his 1959 rejoinder Patinkin once again drew a diagram with a shifting IS curve, showing one more time why unemployment is eventually eliminated. With that, everybody was convinced that Hicks's premises led to Patinkin's conclusion; and thereafter, those who didn't like Patinkin's conclusion were exiled to Post-Keynesianism. This history -- which is also fairly consistent with the interpretation of Leijonhufvud (ibid., pp.17-18) -- leaves one questioning what Hicks, whose brilliance nobody would dispute, could possibly have been thinking. A thicker history, which acknowledges that "economic knowledge is created in real time", can answer that question. In the Duke archive one finds that the two year span between Hicks's review and Patinkin's rejoinder was filled by the correspondence mentioned above. The correspondence points to the exact source of Hicks's error with a precision that the texts themselves, and a history based solely upon them, can not. Hicks began the correspondence immediately after his review was published and Patinkin asked him for reprints. He admitted that his "chaps" at Oxford thought he hadn't given Patinkin "enough credit for making the consumption function depend on the stock of money", so he asked Patinkin to help him clear up the matter (Hicks to Patinkin, 7/6/57). Patinkin's first letter in response already contained all the content that would later be published as the 1959 rejoinder (Patinkin to Hicks, 8/19/57). In fact Patinkin's counter-argument was at this stage already in such detail that Hicks needed three months to digest it (Hicks to Patinkin, 11/13/57), and eventually admitted that he had been "rather frightened of it"! (Hicks to Patinkin, 12/31/57) Nevertheless, even after reading the counter-argument Hicks was not yet convinced. He explained exactly why he didn't see fit to shift his IS curve: his method could be represented algebraically by eliminating real money balances from the IS equation by substitution from the LM. The solutions for the interest rate and income could still be found at the point of intersection of the LM curve and this different IS curve, but a fall in prices would correspond to a movement along the IS, not a shift. And since the IS formed in this way doesn't shift in response to deflation, neither would it seem that the economy can be lifted out of a liquidity trap by deflation. The problem, as Patinkin pointed out in his next letter (Patinkin to Hicks, 1/27/58), was that Hicks had forgotten to check whether the shape of an IS curve constructed in this way still supported his conclusion. By representing their discussion algebraically and taking the total derivative of the IS equation associated with Hicks's argument, Patinkin showed that its slope was not everywhere negative: if there were a minimum interest rate, as the liquidity trap argument suggests, then Hicks's IS curve would have to be horizontal at that rate. And that being the case, deflation and the resulting outward shift of the LM alone would still eliminate unemployment in static equilibrium. The correspondence between them on the topic ends with that letter. It is difficult to imagine that Hicks did not find Patinkin's final argument persuasive. From that time forward, to discuss unemployment in the context of the model, one had to accept Patinkin's explanation of the phenomenon in terms of the model's dynamics rather than its static equilibrium. The alternative was to abandon the model altogether. The conventional history is clear on this last point, but misses much of what took place during the "last skirmish" of the "Keynes and the Classics" debate. Hicks is portrayed as a critic who simply forgot to shift his IS curve -- which is not surprising, since in the published record Patinkin relegated to a footnote the only trace of his argument that really addressed Hicks's questions (Patinkin 1959 p.585 fn.3). Reading their unpublished correspondence suggests a different interpretation. Patinkin's 1959 rejoinder to Hicks was written to persuade the general readers of the Economic Journal -- who never saw, and thus did not understand, the full development of Hicks's argument. The rejoinder was not written to persuade Hicks, whom Patinkin took care of a year and a half earlier by different means. In public the "skirmish" may have come down to an IS curve that should have moved, but in private it was about the different possible techniques of solving the model graphically and algebraically, and the question of the equivalence of their results. This does not amount to an overturning of the history based solely upon the published texts, but it adds a layer to that history that otherwise couldn't exist. Thicker histories are of course comprised of many such layers. Archive materials, of which Duke's Economists' Papers Project is a large repository, allow them to be written. References Gayer, Ted. 1997. Hazardous Waste Risks, Housing Prices, and Economic Methodology. Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University. Gayer, Ted and E.R. Weintraub. 1998. "Refereeing Arrow-Debreu: A View of the Mathematization of Economics". Working Paper. Hicks, John R. 1957. "A Rehabilitation of 'Classical' Economics?". Economic Journal 67: 278-89. Leijonhufvud, Axel. 1969. Keynes and the Classics: Two Lectures on Keynes' Contribution to Economic Theory. (Institute of Economic Affairs Occasional Paper 30). Westminster, U.K.: The Institute of Economic Affairs. Patinkin, Don. 1956. Money, Interest, and Prices: an Integration of Monetary and Value Theory. Evanston, Illinois: Row Peterson. Patinkin, Don. 1959. "Keynesian Economics Rehabilitated: A Rejoinder to Professor Hicks". Economic Journal 69: 582-7. Patinkin, Don. 1942-95. The Papers of Don Patinkin. The Economists' Papers Project, Duke University Special Collections Library. Weintraub, E.R.; Stephen Meardon; Ted Gayer; and Spencer Banzhaf. "Archiving the History of Economics". Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming. ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]