Testimonials

" Econ Journal Watch resists the contamination of scholarship by political bias.  It is even more important, in my view, as a forum for dissecting how unnecessarily pretentious display of method and technique often crowds out attention to how the real world works. "

Leland B. Yeager
Professor Emeritus of Economics, Auburn University


Econ Journal Watch
Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2009 PDF Print E-mail

In this issue:

Great apprehensions, prolonged Depression. Writing in 2008 in the American Economic Review, Gauti Eggertsson claims that Hoover instantiated three policy dogmas, and that, by overcoming Hoover’s dogmas, Roosevelt shifted expectations and brought recovery by the end of his first term. A thoroughgoing critique is offered here by Steven Horwitz. (Professor Eggertsson is invited to reply in a future issue.)

The policy views of American Economic Association members. Robert Whaples shares the results of a new survey that includes many new policy-opinion questions.

Economic Notes from Underground. Four confessions:

  • Bruce Benson tells his troubled story—afflicted for 25 years with economic dissociative identity disorder—but it ends happily.
  • David Hakes tells how he complicated the math to get a paper published.
  • Stephen Kinsella tells of having to teach what you don’t believe in.
  • William P. Leonard tells how he teaches one thing in economics courses but, as college administrator, practices unconscionably to the contrary.

Invisible hand—metaphor of moment? Gavin Kennedy replies to Daniel Klein over Smith’s famous phrase.

The Scottish tradition in economic thought: This 1955 lecture by Alec L. Macfie (1898-1980) richly treats two centuries of Scottish economic thinkers and suggests distinctiveness in the line.

Table of Contents with links to articles (pdf)

Download and print entire May 2009 issue (2.84 MB)

 
 
More Articles...
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next > End >>

Page 1 of 5

Quote of the Day

...It is too clearly indefensible to treat “happiness” or the “good life” for the individual as a definable end to be achieved by a definite technique....

[ Full Quote ]

"My own view of the social-economic policy is not greatly concerned with the notion of treating the individual satisfaction-function as a welfare-function and proceeding to the notion of a social maximum in terms of some relation between individual maxima. It is too clearly indefensible to treat “happiness” or the “good life” for the individual as a definable end to be achieved by a definite technique; and even more indefensible to view the objective of social-economic policy in terms of the amount and distribution of measurable impersonal goods and services. Wealth and poverty are terribly important things, but that view of their significance seems to me an absurd over-simplication. Freedom itself, as a value per se, if far more important."

Frank H. Knight. The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics. Presidential Address delivered at the 62nd annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Chicago, 1950, published in American Economic Review 41(1), March 1951: 1-29; quote on p. 17-18.