Simon Kuznets e a tradicao empirica da economia americana - resenha de livro

------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------

Title: Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

Published by EH.Net (September 2013)

Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo and Nathaniel Grotte, 

Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics. 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xiii +148 pp. $32 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-226-255661-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Alan Heston, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.

Nobel-laureate Robert Fogel died June 11, 2013 at which time he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and Director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.  His wife Enid, one of this volume’s co-authors (who died in 2007), had a long career as Associate Dean of Students at the Booth School.  Fogel has said that Enid was my “most confident supporter and my keenest critic.” This short book sums up many of Fogel’s interests and views of the profession often shaped by Enid, as well as his mentor, Simon Kuznets, who also won the Nobel Prize in economics.

The organization of the book is chronological beginning with the rise of academic economists in the United States and following through with the contributions of Simon Kuznets and his legacy and impact.  The number of academic economists in the federal government rose from 5 in 1876 to 848 during the Hoover administration.  This growth paralleled the creation of data gathering agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the need for information in supporting the efforts of World War I.  Chapter 1 discusses some of the influential academics of the period including the Reverend John Bascom and his Social Gospel tenets.  Bascom’s social activist attitudes evolved from hostility to support of labor movements by the time he took a chair at the University of Wisconsin.  Robert LaFollette, Wisconsin’s governor from 1901 to 1906, sought the advice of Bascom and his associates in formulating protective labor legislation, illustrating the innovative role of state governments at the time.  Bascom’s successors like Richard Ely and John R. Commons furthered the Wisconsin tradition of active involvement in economic and social policies and the role of institutions.

The book devotes another chapter to the establishment of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) beginning in 1914 with discussions with the Rockefeller Foundation about establishment of a social science research center.  Edwin Gay of Harvard proposed a non-teaching institute to the Rockefeller Foundation with Wesley Clair Mitchell as director focusing on prices, wages and rents, but the war stalled negotiations.  The book points out the support that Herbert Hoover provided for increasing collection of economic data both as Commerce Secretary and President.  As economists became involved with the war effort in terms of price controls, production planning, energy needs, and transport issues the need for better economic data became obvious.  This provided and impetus for the incorporation of the NBER in 1920 with Gay as president.  The involvement of universities on the governing board was formalized in 1927 and Mitchell was the first research director, a post he held until 1945.

An early project of the NBER was estimation of personal income and production, an area of research that Kuznets directed.  During the Great Depression, the Senate directed that the Department of Commerce provide national accounts estimates for the years 1929-31. Kuznets was invited to direct this project and he accepted.  Kuznets had been teaching part time at the University of Pennsylvania since 1930 and one of his students in Penn’s MA program, Robert Nathan, assisted him at Commerce.  They provided the Senate estimates on time and included calculations for 1932 as a bonus, and Nathan became the first director of national accounts at Commerce.  Another student of Kuznets, Milton Gilbert, joined Nathan in 1935 to work on national accounts and edit the Survey of Current Business.  In 1941 Nathan left Commerce to direct the War Production Board and Gilbert became director of National Accounts until 1951, the post-war period being a crucial time in development of the UN System of National Accounts.  Kuznets in 1935 initiated a cooperative research program, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) that continues to bring together academics and practitioners to discuss major conceptual and measurement issues.

Kuznets put national accounts estimates to good use in his major study of comparative economic growth cited by the Nobel Committee in presenting his award in 1971.  The book discusses this study in Chapter 4, where its origin and results are described.  When Kuznets first proposed this study to the NBER in the late 1940s, the response was underwhelming so he turned to Social Science Research Council who supported the proposal and created their Committee on Economic Growth.  One can see Fogel’s own views in his exposition of Chapter 4 and his treatment of Kuznets’ methodology in Chapter 5.  Kuznets’ theory is set out in 14 interconnected relationships, described in tables and charts, and involving formal algebraic models.  The modeling is implicit in all of Kuznets’ work and Fogel emphasizes the implicit theory, including the interactions between technology, production, per capita product, population growth, sectoral shifts out of agriculture and distributional shifts in income distribution.

Richard Easterlin, another student of Kuznets, has pursued a successful career eschewing algebraic formulations for tables, charts and ample explanation.  Easterlin’s current work on comparative studies of income and happiness follows studies of migration and regional growth and incomes within the United States historically.  The emphasis on regional growth has been incorporated in the regional income division within the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  Fogel’s own research has often used a more econometric approach, but always with attention to a logical narrative.  Kuznets was not against formal models but believed that they should emerge from a body of data and a problem to be addressed.  He would question empirical findings that apparently supported a formal model but produced results that did not have other plausible explanations.  In Chapter 5 Fogel argues that Kuznets was the most important theorist since Keynes, implicitly and often explicitly questioning trends in the economics profession over the last fifty years.

Chapters 6 and 7 are short summaries of the legacy of Kuznets in economics and what has happened since his death in 1985.  In addition to his many articles and books, Chapter 6 describes the role of Kuznets in organizing cooperative research umbrellas like the CRIW and the Committee on Economic Growth at SSRC.  Within the NBER tent a group of Kuznets’ students were invited by Martin Feldstein in 1978 to establish a program to carry out the Kuznets tradition in economic research.  This became the Development of the American Economy (DAE) projects that took on subjects like nutrition and heights and the role of women in the U.S. economy.  This research went in new and much less aggregative directions, becoming a very successful initiative. Not surprisingly Chapter 7 is hastily written.

Let me note one other legacy of Kuznets in the tradition of comparative growth.  In addition to Milton Gilbert, Irving Kravis was a student of Kuznets at Penn.  When Gilbert left the BEA he became Director of Statistics at the OECD (then OEEC).  One early project was a study of purchasing power parities of the U.S. with respect to the four large European economies – France, Germany, Italy and the UK.  At the time the exchange rate was a poor conversion factor because of exchange controls in Europe.  Gilbert asked Kravis to come to Paris to join him in the study, resulting in the Gilbert-Kravis study that was very well received.  It led the United Nations to lead an initiative to compare a set of more diverse economies, including Colombia, Hungary, India, Japan, Kenya and the five OEEC countries.  The Ford Foundation funded part of the project through Penn with Kravis a joint director with the UN Statistical Office.  The International Comparison Program (ICP) began in 1968, left Penn after the 1975 round of 34 countries; a derivative contribution – the Penn World Table (PWT) – continued academic involvement.  ICP has grown to involve 182 countries in its 2011 round.  This extension of comparative national accounts to employ PPP national currency conversions is another legacy of Kuznets. 

This is a very readable and informative book that provides a reminder of the many contributions that Kuznets has made to the field including students as influential as Robert Fogel.

Alan Heston is Emeritus Professor of Economics and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught from 1962 to 2003. 

Copyright (c) 2013 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (September 2013). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

Geographic Location: North America
Subject: Development of the Economic History Discipline: Historiography; Sources and Methods, History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time: 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

PIB: tirar o G da equacao melhora o calculo - Mises Daily

Governos, como se sabe, não produzem um centavo de riqueza. Podem até ajudar a criar, se forem bem comportados (o que não é o caso do nosso), mas costumam cobrar um preço pesado por isso.
Está na hora de tirar o G da equação do PIB, onde nunca deveria ter entrado.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

NationalAccounts


Government Bloat is Not Growth: Real Gross Domestic Private Product, 2000–2011


by Robert Higgs

Mises Daily,December 20, 2012

In the 1930s and 1940s, when the modern system of national income and product accounts (NIPA) was being developed, the scope of national product was a hotly debated issue. No issue stirred more debate than the question, Should government product be included in gross product? Simon Kuznets (Nobel laureate in economic sciences, 1971), the most important American contributor to the development of the accounts, had major reservations about including all government purchases in national product. Over the years, others have elaborated on these reasons and adduced others.

Why should government product be excluded? First, the government’s activities may be viewed as giving rise to intermediate, rather than final products, even if the government provides such valuable services as enforcement of private property rights and settlement of disputes. Second, because most government services are not sold in markets, they have no market-determined prices to be used in calculating their total value to those who benefit from them. Third, because many government services arise from political, rather than economic motives and institutions, some of them may have little or no value. Indeed, some commentators—including the present writer—ultimately went so far as to assert that some government services have negative value: given a choice, the people victimized by these “services” would be willing to pay to be rid of them.

When the government attained massive proportions during World War II, this debate was set aside for the duration of the war, and the accounts were put into a form that best accommodated the government’s attempt to plan and control the economy for the primary purpose of winning the war. This situation of course dictated that the government’s spending, which grew to constitute almost half of the official GDP during the peak years of the war, be included in GDP, and the War Production Board, the Commerce Department, and other government agencies involved in calculating the NIPA recruited a large corps of clerks, accountants, economists, and others to carry out the work.

After the war, the Commerce Department, which carried forward the national accounting to which it had contributed during the war (since 1972 within its Bureau of Economic Analysis [BEA]), naturally preferred to continue the use of its favored system, which treats all government spending for final goods and services as part of GDP. Economists such as Kuznets, who did not favor this treatment, attempted for a while to continue their work along their own, different lines, but none of them could compete with the enormous, well-funded statistical organization the government possessed, and eventually almost all of them gave up and accepted the official NIPA.[1]

Thus did government spending become lodged in the definition and measurement of GDP in a way that ensuing generations of economists, journalists, policy makers, and others considered appropriate and took for granted. Nonetheless, the issues that had been disputed at length in the 1930s and 1940s did not disappear. They were simply disregarded as if they had been resolved, even though they had not been resolved intellectually, but simply swept under the Commerce Department’s expansive (and expensive) rug. In particular, the inclusion of government spending in GDP remained extremely problematic.

Generations of elementary economics students since World War II have come away from Economics 101 having learned, if anything, that gross domestic product is defined as

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M).

That is, GDP for a given period, usually a year, is the sum of spending for final goods and services by domestic private consumers, domestic private investors, and governments at all levels, plus foreign purchases of U.S. exports minus American purchases of U.S. imports.

This sort of accounting supplies the basic framework for the Keynesian models that swept the economics profession in the 1940s and 1950s, from which a key policy conclusion was derived—that the government can vary its spending to offset shortfalls or excesses of private spending and thereby stabilize the economy’s growth while maintaining “full employment.” From the beginning, the most emphasized part of this conclusion was that increases in government spending can offset declines in private spending and thereby prevent or moderate macroeconomic contractions.

Much of the increase in government spending in recent decades has taken the form of increased transfer payments—payments for which the government receives no current good or service in return—such as Social Security pensions, disability benefits, and payments via Medicare or Medicaid to subsidize program beneficiaries’ health-care services. In 2000, such payments amounted to 56 percent of all federal spending; in 2011, they were more than 61 percent. Transfer payments do not enter the computation of national income and product; only purchases of final goods and services do so. Keynesian economists argue, however, that government may use increases in transfer payments to cushion business slumps in the same way that it may use increases in its purchases of final goods and services because increases in transfer payments augment personal income and stimulate greater consumption spending, hence greater investment spending, and therefore, from both sources, an increase in GDP.

The foregoing issues have taken on special cogency during the past five years, as the federal government has greatly increased its total spending. Real total federal outlays increased by 32 percent, from $2,729 billion to $3,603 billion (in chained 2005 dollars), between fiscal years 2007 and 2011. Although much of this increase has taken the form of increases in transfer payments, the part that is included in GDP has also risen substantially—at the federal level, it increased by 15.6 percent (in real dollars) between 2007 and 2011. Some of this increase was offset by a decrease in state and local government purchases of final goods and services, which fell by 3 percent during this period. (Data come from BEA, Table 1.1.6, Real Gross Domestic Product, Chained Dollars.)

As the basic Keynesian model implies, the recent increases in government spending appear to have prevented an even greater decline in real GDP during the recession that began in the winter of 2007-2008. But however that may be, because so much of this spending may have had little or no value—or even negative value—in itself, the question remains as to whether, despite what the official GDP figures show, the population’s true economic well-being might have suffered a greater contraction than mainstream economists, journalists, policy makers, and others for the most part believe.

To resolve this question, I have computed what I call gross domestic private product (GDPP), which is simply the standard real GDP minus the government purchases part of it. (Data come from BEA, Table 1.1.6, Real Gross Domestic Product, Chained Dollars.) The figure shows the movement of this variable from 2000 to 2011, the most recently completed year.

Real Gross Domestic Private Product (billions of chained 2005 dollars)

If real GDPP had grown at its long-run average rate of about 3 percent per year during the period from 2000 to 2011, it would have increased by about 38 percent. In reality, however, GDPP increased during this period by only 18 percent, or by about 1.5 percent per year on average. (Real GDP, by comparison, increased by about 1.6 percent per year on average, producing a small increase in the government share of GDP.) So, during this period of more than a decade, private product grew at only about half of its historical average rate. Between 2002 and 2007, while the housing bubble was giving rise to seemingly buoyant growth even beyond the housing sector, the good times appeared to have returned, but the inevitable bust from 2007 to 2009 and the slow recovery since 2009 pulled the intermediate-run growth rate for 2000-2011 back to an anemic level. The recovery of the period 2009-2011 brought the GDPP back only to its 2007 level, signifying four years in which no net gain had been made and much suffering had occurred between the beginning and the end of the period.

Perhaps the most positive statement we can make about the private economy’s performance during this twelve-year period is that it has been somewhat better than complete stagnation. But private product has lost ground relative to total official GDP. Moreover, many of the measures taken to deal with the contraction—the government’s huge run-up in its spending and debt; the Fed’s great expansion of bank reserves, its allocation of credit directly to failing companies and struggling sectors, and its accommodation of the federal government’s gigantic deficits; and the government’s enactment of extremely unsettling regulatory statutes, especially Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act—have served to discourage the private investment needed to hasten the recovery and lay the foundation for more rapid economic growth in the long run. To find a similar perfect storm of counter-productive government fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies, we must go back to the 1930s, when the measures taken under Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt turned what probably would have been an ordinary, short-lived recession into the Great Depression.[2] If the government and the Fed persist in the kind of destructive policies they have undertaken since 2007, the potential for another great depression will remain. Even without such a catastrophe, the U.S. economy presents at best the prospect of weak performance for many years to come.

Notes:

[1] Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 64-68; and Ellen O’Brien, “How the ‘G’ Got into the GNP,” in Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 10, Method, Competition, Conflict and Measurement in the Twentieth Century, ed. Karen I. Vaughn. (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1994), p. 242.

[2] Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 159-95; Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War, pp. 3-29.

Simon Kuznets: os judeus e a economia (book review)

----- EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------

Published by EH.Net (August 2012)

Simon Kuznets, Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond – Volume I: The Economic Life of American Jewry (edited by Stephanie Lo and E. Glen Weyl). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012. liv + 239 pp. $50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-4128-4211-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Daniel A. Schiffman, Department of Economics and Business Administration, Ariel University Center.

Simon Kuznets (1901-1985), the 1971 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is renowned for his contributions to development economics and national income accounting. This book documents a less well known aspect of Kuznets' career – his pioneering contributions to Jewish economic history.

This is the first volume of a two-volume set. The set consists of six papers, four of which were previously unpublished, published in Hebrew, or published in abridged form. The contents of Volume I are as follows:
1. "Preface" (Lo), a brief description of all six papers;
2. "Introduction: Simon Kuznets, Cautious Empiricist of the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora," (Weyl), a forty-page essay which places the six papers within the context of Kuznets' life and work;
3. "Economic Structure and Life of the Jews," a draft that was published in abridged form in 1961, by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York;
4. "Economic Structure of U.S. Jewry: Recent Trends," a lecture delivered at the home of Israel's President, originally published in Hebrew;
5. "Economic Growth of U.S. Jewry," an unfinished, previously unpublished manuscript.

In these papers, Kuznets describes the economic transformation of world Jewry in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on immigration, human capital accumulation, occupational structure and income distribution. Readers who are familiar with Kuznets will recognize his unique methodology, which is characterized by careful definition of concepts, meticulous empirical analysis and fact-based theoretical insights. Kuznets' findings include the following:
a. Jews have paid a heavy economic price to preserve their cohesion and identity.
b. Discrimination against Jews is highly irrational.  
c. Waves of immigration generate significant inequality, accompanied by cultural gaps, between veteran immigrants and newer arrivals.
d. In a pre-World War II sample of 12 nations, Jews were overrepresented in trade and finance and (to a lesser extent) industry and handicrafts. Jews were underrepresented in agriculture, transportation, communications and personal services.
e. In the early 1950's, Israel integrated its immigrants by allowing them to consume more than they produced. This policy, combined with a high rate of investment in physical capital, necessitated large capital inflows from abroad. 
f. In 1957, American Jews were highly urbanized and educated, relative to the general U.S. population. Between 1910 and 1957, Jewish males shifted from industrial occupations to professional and technical occupations. In the 1950's and 1960's, Jewish females married later and had a lower birth rate, relative to the general population. Jewish females had a high labor force participation rate before marriage, but tended to leave the labor force after marriage. The distribution of income among Jews had a higher mean, greater rightward skewness and greater inequality than the general distribution of income. 

Why did Simon Kuznets devote time and energy to the study of Jewish economic history? Kuznets emigrated from Russia to the U.S. in 1922. As a secular Jew and staunch Zionist, he affirmed his Jewish loyalties by studying Jewish economic history and by promoting economic research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. However, he was ambivalent about his Jewish-oriented writings. In a 1973 letter, he declined Martin Feldstein's proposal to disseminate "Economic Growth of U.S. Jewry" as a Harvard economics department working paper. Kuznets explained that his Jewish-oriented writings were less than fully objective, because the topics reflected his "interests and associations as a Jew."

What motivated Weyl and Lo to edit Jewish Economies? In 2007, Weyl, who is now an economic theorist at the University of Chicago, wrote a term paper on Kuznets for an undergraduate history course at Princeton. Weyl consulted Kuznets' personal papers and interviewed his children, Paul Kuznets and Judith Stein. After completing his Ph.D. in economics at Princeton in 2008, Weyl joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he collaborated with research assistant Stephanie Lo (currently an analyst at DC Energy). Weyl explains that he is drawn to Kuznets by virtue of their common background and challenges. Like Kuznets, Weyl was born into a secular Jewish family; like Kuznets, Weyl strives to create the proper balance between universalism and Jewish identity.

Weyl's introduction is very enlightening. Using archival material and interviews, Weyl uncovers new facts about Kuznets' personal and professional lives. Weyl also ventures into the realm of intellectual biography: He explores the connection between Kuznets' background and his economic thought, and demonstrates the existence of important parallels between Kuznets' general and Jewish-oriented works. For example:
• Kuznets emphasized the role of culture and institutions in Jewish economic life. This parallels his emphasis on culture and institutions in development (which was highly unconventional in the 1950's).
• Kuznets hypothesized that over time, income inequality among Jewish immigrants would rise and then fall. This parallels the famous Kuznets curve, which posits an inverted-U relationship between development and income inequality.
• In the Middle Ages, European Jews were excluded from all professions except moneylending. This historical fact may have inspired Kuznets to assert (in Income from Independent Professional Practice, coauthored with Milton Friedman) that occupational licensure reduces competition.
• Kuznets saw immigration as a leading factor in Israel's economic development. He also recognized the disastrous effect of U.S. immigration restrictions in the pre-Holocaust years. Not surprisingly, Kuznets' general work is strongly pro-immigration.

Weyl suggests that some of Kuznets' most famous (general) economic insights were inspired by his Jewish-oriented works. Unfortunately, conclusive evidence is lacking; Kuznets deliberately concealed his motivations, and maintained a strict separation between his general and Jewish-oriented works.

I have two minor quibbles with Jewish Economies. First, there is a small but growing post-Kuznets literature on Jewish economic history; contributors include Barry Chiswick, Carmel Chiswick, Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein and Cormac Ó Gráda. Weyl and Lo do not bring this literature to the attention of the reader. Second, the introduction is marred by occasional typographical errors and incorrect cross-references.

In conclusion, Jewish Economies is an important scholarly contribution. It should be required reading for specialists in the fields of economic development, human capital and history of economic thought. Weyl and Lo have contributed to the economics literature in three ways: They have collected Kuznets' virtually forgotten writings on Jewish economic history, revealed previously unknown aspects of Kuznets' identity and worldview, and demonstrated important parallels between Kuznets' general and Jewish-oriented works. Hopefully, the publication of Jewish Economies will stimulate further research on Jewish economists of the twentieth century.

Daniel A. Schiffman is a lecturer in economics at Ariel University Center in Israel. He specializes in economic history and history of economic thought. He has published articles on Jewish monetary thought and is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics (2010).  E-mail: daniels@ariel.ac.il

Copyright (c) 2012 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (August 2012). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Geographic Location: Europe, Middle East, North America
Subject: Development of the Economic History Discipline: Historiography; Sources and Methods, Education and Human Resource Development, Historical Demography, including Migration, Labor and Employment History
Time: 19th Century, 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

===============

Comment by E. Roy Weintraub (Economic History List)

As I noted in another place (in HOPE  2011, no. 1), 27 of the first 62 Nobel Laureates in economics (to 2009) were Jewish.  One would suppose that historians of economics would be interested to interrogate/problematize this fact.  Feminist historians of economics have written about the underrepresentation of women economists in the history of economics canon.  Afro-American historians of economics have written freely and effectively about the underrepresentation of Afro-American economists in canonical histories of especially American economics.  One would have expected, by any symmetry thesis, that historians would be equally interested in overrepresentation of a particular ethnic or diaspora community as they would in the underrepresentation of such a community in the community of economists.  This however has not occurred.  

The difficulty is quite real and reflects a strange sensibility.  The first economist who wrote about these matters was Thorstein Veblen who, in 1919, wrote a paper called “The Intellectual Pre-Eminence Jews in Modern Europe” in the Political Science Quarterly.  In that paper Veblen sought to explain what he regarded as the overrepresentation of “the chosen people” in the sciences and in fields of scholarship and intellectual inquiry.  His own explanation was that habits of scholarship and learning within the community set the stage for young Jews, breaking free of the ties of their established communities, and living among gentiles, to bring a skeptical and inquiring mindset to the intellectual problems in which they worked, and that mindset was particularly suited to the kinds of scientific explanations that the modern age seemed to need.  

Leaving Veblen’s rumination, which is hardly evidence based or convincing, to one side, any discussion of the place of Jews in the learned professions has proceeded without the contributions of historians of economics.  Intellectual historians, like the preeminent David Hollinger, have examined questions about the role of Jews, and anti-Semitism, in the academic community in the United States.  Hollinger’s discussions about the anti-Semitism in the pre-World War II period and the secularization of the universities from the war onward, which permitted the rapid influx of Jewish scholars after World War II, are well known.  Intellectual historians, and historians of the university, have seen fit to raise these questions and to seek both data and insight.  Social scientists have found publication outlets about the role of Jews in the American universities in primarily Jewish publications.  The work by Seymour Lipset and Lewis Feuer is typical.  These kinds of studies are both well known, and apparently unknown to historians of economics.  Historians of physics like Daniel Kevles have written about these matters in their own histories for many, many years.  Historians of mathematics (per the centenary of the American Mathematical Society) have written with care and detail about such matters. 

Not so historians of economics.  If one examines the work of economists and historians of economics, I am aware of exactly one article in English, written by a historian of economics, that addresses this subject, and that article appeared not in an economics journal or a history of economics journal but in the journal Judiasm. Its author was Mark Perlman.    

Why was it left to an economic theorist, a non-historian of economics, the remarkable Glen Weyl, to broach these issues? 

-- 

E. Roy Weintraub

Professor of Economics

Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy

Duke University

www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html