On The Economic History of the United States in the Twentieth Century

by Doug Dowd

“The generation since 1945 has…been brought up amid institutional and international problems. If this is the case, perhaps economic history must broaden its traditional scope.” Thus remarked Thomas C. Cochran, when ten years ago he was asked to speak to the present topic for the Economic History Association.¹The “institutional and international problems” that became evident between 1945 and 1959 have of course broadened and deepened, both at home and abroad, and there is nothing about which we care — the economy, the university, the polity, the family, religion and morality, the young, our cities, the relationships between the races, peace — that is not now imbedded in crisis, lurching along paths that lead we know not where. Is it irrelevant to our condition that the social sciences, and among them, economic history, have since 1945, and even more since Professor Cochran issued his muted warning, narrowed, not broadened, their scope? It is with these matters and questions in mind that the economic historiography of our country in this century will be evaluated.

Before proceeding, however, useless dispute may be forestalled by acknowledging, or rather asserting, that of course this is not the only legitimate focus for the paper asked of me. In turn, this is to say that a substantial amount of valuable work has been done about the United States in this century by economic historians, work whose value is measured only in part by the fact that the larger and undone tasks cannot be accomplished without leaning on it. Especially since the mid-1930's, economists with a historical approach have provided us with numerous studies of particular firms, industries, sectors, and regions, and of particular unions, labor markets, financial institutions, and patterns of foreign trade and finance. Those who wish an efficient compendium of such works up to 1959 will find them noted by Professor Cochran in the essay cited above, and they may be assured that the quantity of such works has greatly increased in the past decade, without any diminution in quality. But one may also be assured that such works do not speak to our condition. What is that condition? And, if economic historians have failed to speak to it adequately, is this because such an accomplishment is not within their abilities, not part of their mandate, or something else? Let us turn to the latter questions first, before examining what I have called our condition, and before making suggestions as to what kinds of work are thus urgently required. What will emerge will be much more in the nature of a polemic than a review essay; but it is the former we require, if there is to be much of anything worth reviewing in the future.

As a way of beginning, it may be noted that the very category “economic historians” points to one corner of the problem. In an essay as delightful as it is incisive, J.H. Hexter has written of the proclivity of historians to “split the past into a series of tunnels, each continuous from the remote past to the present, but practically self-contained at every point and sealed off from contact with or contamination by anything that was going on in any of the other tunnels.”² He went on in the same vein to decry the use of “factors” as tools of historical explanation, and saw the factor approach as having its main source in the various tunnels. If all this conjures up visions of moles tunneling blindly — and happily? — in directions that bear little or no promise of ever intersecting, and using as their instruments the sharp teeth that the varieties of moles — economic, social,  political, military, etc. — have, then that is the appropriate vision to contemplate — as it is also appropriate to remember that when moles do surface they are helpless; they have the defects of their virtues.

What Hexter has to say about historians in general may be said a fortiori of those economic historians who have been trained as economists. This species of tunnel historians is by its training inclined to partial equilibrium analysis, which means not only that its habitat is a tunnel but that its inclination is to burrow in tiny branches and sub-branches of the main. Thus, an economic historian will commonly be found confining his attention to the specifically “economic” processes and relationships in a given time period, and within that to one particular market, industry, firm, or relationship  (which satisfies his partial equilibrium itch); and even more, he will usually emphasize the importance of one factor of production — e.g., labor, capital, resources in the “determination” of the process. The full implications of this sort of investigative process unhappily need not be left to speculation; they are available for study in the work of the so-called Cliometricians. These “new economic historians” emerged from their tunnels through apertures that might be  thought of as underground silos, and they have lifted off,  bright and shiny, into outer space. There they orbit, and  would do no harm, were it not that much of the training of on  coming economic historians is in their hands.

As yet, in my own reading, the social astronauts have done no work on the twentieth century, despite the fact that the paucity of data is severely limiting for the earlier periods they have chosen to study. This gives a daring quality to what they do, which may or may not be fortuitous here, as with real astronauts. Soon, however, they and their students may be expected to take heed of the obvious; or, to put it more usefully, econometricians who deal with questions of this century are likely to find Cliometrics an engaging way to extend their studies into what they will see as a historical perspective.

I dwell this long on the Cliometricians not because they are villains, which, as honorable men, they are not; but because they represent in extreme and extended form the manner in which the training of economists shapes the methodology of economic historians. They tend quite naturally to ask the kinds of questions that economists ask, and to ask them in the economist's way. If we are looking for methodological shortcomings, we must therefore look to the disciplines, and to the compartmentalization and departmentalization of disciplines, from which such qualities have sprung — a point that was central to Hexter in the essay noted above. In short, if we are to make critical comments on the training, the methodology, and the output of economic historians, we shall soon find ourselves peering mostly not into the corner where economic historians dwell, but into the entire structure and functioning of the higher learning in the social sciences.

That structure is one aptly characterized as a network of specializations with, as time goes on, ever finer threads being added to the network. Given our world, and its desperate need for social understanding, it may be imagined that at some time — and some would guess that the time is already upon us — the network will sunder and disintegrate. If that is so, it will be because our network of specializations, functional though it may or may not have been in the past, has now become dysfunctional. To say that, and to support it, requires that we ask not only what trained minds have done and how they have done it, but what they have not done, and why they have not. In turn, this requires that we ask questions about the institutional stimuli that impinge upon the universities, the social functions they perform, and the prime beneficiaries of what ensues.

It is a commonplace that the universities, from their medieval beginnings to the present, have substantially reflected, and in subtle or obvious ways served, the society within which they have subsisted. How subtle or obvious that relationship has been is clearly a matter not so much of the importance of the relationship, but of the degree to which it is or is not called into question; and that is a matter of whether or not and to what degree the general performance of the society is called into question. It is also a commonplace, or should be if it is not, that the universities have been at once a prime source of subversion and an important bastion of conservatism in society. The subversion has issued from developments in science and technology, most especially in the more recent past; the conserving function has been performed by the social sciences and the humanities. Would that more had been conserved; but would, also, that more had been subverted — or, to put it more clearly, would that the social sciences had found ways of understanding which would have allowed technological change, institutional change, and the quality of life all to move along together in balance with each other and with an acceptable notion of the summum bonum. A bit of everything happens, of course; but one cannot help but be impressed with how that which has been conserved has created problems by its persistence, and be frightened by how little we really know of how to cope with either the problems or the possibilities posed by rapidly changing technologies.

The social scientists (I shall not comment one way or another on the humanists) have neglected their proper function and we shall have no chance to find out what difference it might have made if they had not. In any case we now have a society which is being called into question from all sides -but least of all, it should be noted, by social scientists, who go about finding ways of making the existing system work better. There is an alternative, and it begins by asking a different set of questions in a different mood: How does the society work, where “work” means who gains and who loses? What is gained and lost? What are the dynamics at work, and how and why? Science is critical, or is not science. To be scientific a social scientist must be a social critic, if for no other reason than that a scientific approach to society should take no institutions as given, nothing as beyond critical examination. Values should define our ends; not the preservation of particular institutions.

None of this is meant to be ad hominem. We are concerned with a social phenomenon, which is to say that the behavior of social scientists must be approached institutionally, for the social sciences are themselves an institution. Veblen traveled this road long ago when he began to wonder what was wrong in the universities, and to explain the at best tame and at worst misleading and dangerous contributions of the social sciences.

Distempered critics have even alleged that the academic leaders in the social sciences are held under some constraint, as being, in some sort, in the pay of the well-to-do conservative element….Now, it may be conceded without violence to notorious facts, that these official leaders of science do commonly reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law and order, particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the distribution of wealth. But this need imply no constraint, nor even any peculiar degree of tact, much less a moral obliquity… [for they] are free to give the fullest expression to any conclusions or convictions to which their inquiries may carry them. That they are able to do so is a fortunate circumstance, due to the fact that their intellectual horizon is bounded by the same limits of commonplace insight and preconceptions as are the prevailing opinions of the conservative middle class.³

When Veblen's approach is trained on economics, we find that both before and since his time economists have come to conclusions that are not only innocuous to the status quo but frequently useful — to the status quo, as distinct from social understanding. Some apparent exceptions to this generalization will be noted shortly, but we may say here that they strengthen rather than weaken the rule, and for the moment set them aside.

The nature and the focus of contemporary economics finds its principal origins in the late nineteenth-century Britain, as it finds its principal questions for analysis the questions whose answers were most needed by the businesslike society of Great Britain. Naturally, what we can learn is limited by the questions we ask; of those things we place outside our framework, those things we take as given, we can learn nothing. What was set aside by the British theorists were all those matters that have to do with institutional and technological change — the very matters, you will note, that make up the heart of social change — and what was examined were those matters that, viewed most abstractly, made for efficiency. The resulting body of analysis came to be preoccupied with partial equilibrium models, to the point that when whole economies found themselves in dire straits — e.g., Great Britain throughout the 1920's, and all the industrial capitalist economies in the 1930's — economics not only found itself unable to explain what was happening but was led for an excruciatingly long moment to deny the reality of what was happening: was it not theoretically impossible? Thus it was that Keynes, in the Preface to his path-breaking General Theory (1936) was led to say that his was an “attempt by an economist to bring to an issue the deep divergences of opinion between fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic theory, and will, until they are resolved, continue to do so.” And later, “the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”⁴

What was remarkable about Keynesian theory was not that it was a source of considerable controversy within the profession and as between the profession and the business community, but that the larger implications and possibilities of the new theoretical departure were so soon placed once more back into the methodological cocoon that insulates economics from the fundamental thrusts of institutional and technological change. As for the early controversy, not only economists but politicians and businessmen today assert: “We are all Keynesians now.” The New Economics, in short, has been housebroken.

However, just as pre-Keynesian economics was irrelevant to the economic crisis of the interwar years, so too is contemporary economics largely irrelevant or even misleading for the social crisis of today — in our own country, and as regards our country in the world. If there are substantial differences between economics and the other social sciences, one would have to say that our irrelevancy is more elegant, more sophisticated, than that in the other social sciences. All this is nicely reflected in economic history and best of all in the new economic history.

Earlier, some exceptions to these melancholy observations were mentioned as requiring discussion. The discussion need only be brief. Departures from the focus and the method of neo-classical economics have taken place, some of them seeking to speak to our present condition. But to the degree that they have been undertaken by conventionally-trained economists, using the tools they have learned to use, they have added considerably more in the way of incoherence to economics than understanding of the place and meaning of economic affairs in our society. The theory that economics has developed -micro and macroeconomics — possesses whatever relevance it has only for advanced economies,*and only for those aspects of the performance of advanced economies that have to do with achieving short-run efficiency and stability.

Some economists are of the opinion that they are providing meaningful analyses of growth; but that must be questioned. They are providing models of growth, assuming that neither institutional nor technological change takes place. When one moves from such assumptions, he is in the complex and widely-misunderstood area of economic development — a veritable jungle of concepts, “theories,” assumptions, and methods — whose results tempt one to believe that the people of the world would be better off if economists would stay in bed. As for the problem areas cited earlier — race, poverty, the economy (yes, the economy), our cities — that are clearly close to the concerns of economists, not to mention those other areas (the polity, the university, the young, peace) that seem distant, but cannot be said to be so in the absence of a systematic understanding of how society moves and changes — as for all these, what has the economist told us that can be trusted, and be the basis for intelligent decisions?

Such churlish questions take me back to economic history. I am not one who believes that social scientists and historians should look at the day's headlines and plunge into examination of the connected matters in his own discipline. Indeed, I complained above because that is just what many have been doing, and doing so badly. What is essential, as was earlier suggested, is an ever-richer understanding of how society moves and changes. If we possessed, having developed, even a modest part of such understanding, we might not be so surprised at the headlines, nor would we find so much occasion for shock. Social understanding is not necessary for some one group or faction, it is necessary for all who wish to behave responsibly in their society, whatever the star that guides them.

It is asking too much, but also just enough, to suggest that social scientists consider explicitly whom they are serving. Economists of the neo-classical persuasion were serving the needs of the business society in which they lived, whatever they may have thought they were (and are) doing. And in doing that, they contributed to making the effective dominance of business in society greater than it might otherwise have been. They helped to make the status quo work better. There is nothing wrong with that, if there is nothing basically wrong with the status quo. But how are we to know the degree to and the ways in which there is something wrong with the status quo, except from

1) the understanding provided by objective (which is not to say neutral) scholars, or

2) the turbulence that is caused by those who seek change as they interact with those who try to stop it?

The condition of our own day is that our knowledge that there is something basically wrong has come almost exclusively from the turbulence, not from the accumulated understanding, of our times. Nor is it incautious to believe that when our sources of information are the cries of the wounded, and of those who are wounding them, it may well be too late to hope for processes of change that are both needed and constructive.

When Hegel said that the Owl of Minerva takes wing at twilight, he was saying that twilight is too late for wisdom and understanding to hold off the night. There is a hopeful, (if also ironic) reservation we may make about that probability, however. We know so little about the process of social change that we are genuinely unable to predict where we are going, and that is to say we really don't know where we are. Our ignorance may be making us gloomier than the objective situation — if only we knew what that is — warrants. Where there's life there's hope. So it may not be too late for social scientists to begin to provide what society so badly needs: understanding. How might we go about gaining the kinds of understanding we need, and how different are they from what we now gain?

My first proposal may be rude enough to deter anyone from paying attention to anything that follows it. It is that we should seek, in the words of a British economist, “to be vaguely right rather than precisely wrong.” In different words, our desperate needs are for gross understanding rather than for precise formulation of matters that, whether we understand them or not, leave us in a sinking boat — in which, to quote another Britisher, we cannot afford “lectures on navigation while the ship is going down.” Cross understanding of what? And how go about gaining it?

I find it promising and intellectually exciting to have as an analytical goal a part in the effort to understand “the place of economic affairs in society,” the mundane phrase used earlier. For the economic historian, to understand that place is to understand how economic affairs relate dynamically to what are called non-economic affairs, over time. This is not as mundane a view as the non-economist might think. The most recent definition of economics I have seen is the

…study of a society's use of its resources with reference to 1) the extent to which they are used, 2) how efficiently they are used, 3) the choice between competing alternative uses, and 4) the nature and [economic] consequences of changes in productive power over time.⁵

Scarcity, choice, and efficiency, over time. How economic matters relate to society in any systematic or analytic way is excluded, by definition.

The economic historian cannot of course study everything, and he will do well indeed if he is able to study anything well. In turn, that requires that he have a firm notion of what it is he is trying to do, and why, and what part his own work plays in a larger inquiry. Science is cooperative and purposive. Whatever else is needed these days, it is methodological clarity, which requires self-consciousness as to one's purposes. As will be argued later, however, clarity by itself is not enough; we need a guiding analytical framework.

Is it not possible that the methodological confusion so much characterizing the social sciences today is due to an implicit unwillingness to face the question: What am I doing, and why? That necessarily returns one to, the question of who and what is being served by the inquiry. Is it not clear that the largest part by far of social science today serves those most who can best afford to pay, and serves those (or that) least that most need help? Those who are served — in business, in government, in the military — are those who have power and who derive it from what exists: they are not much interested in finding a critical analysis of the system, current or historical.

All this does not come down to prostitution, for a prostitute is seldom unclear about the client-servant relationship. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is to say something optimistic; that is, self-consciousness by social scientists could lead many to seek ways of becoming scientific in procedure as well as in name. What might that mean?

What might it mean, specifically, as regards the economic history of twentieth-century United States? That question takes me back to one posed earlier: What is our present condition? It is a condition we understand only dimly, at best; a condition we would understand considerably better if economic history (and its sister disciplines) had done their job properly. Let me now be specific on this score, and do so by recalling the “areas” of crisis noted earlier — the economy, the university, the polity, the family, religion and morality, the young, our cities, the relationships between the races, peace.

One need not adhere to a particular political position -be it conservative, liberal, or radical — to read down that list with a deep sense of uneasiness, and apprehension concerning the future. Let us assume that at no time in our history has any of these areas been trouble free. There has been no Golden Age. The compelling characteristic of our day is not that trouble has suddenly arisen here and there, but that the imperfections in each of these areas has become painfully and often turbulently evident, and that, in the very recent past all have shown the same signs of crisis. More than that, it is quite clear that crisis in one area meshes with and is intensified by crisis in the others. We are, in short, a society in crisis, living in a world in crisis. Troubles there have always been, to be sure; but it is not historical innocence to argue that there has never been anything quite like this.

Nor is it a new species of economic determinism to argue that both the general dimensions of our crisis, and the means by which it may be resolved, are economic at their center. More specifically, the priority that has been given to economic criteria in our own society, and the manner in which political, sociological, psychological, and ethical considerations have thus been allowed (or been led) to become secondary, has produced the kind of warping in society that might be reasonably expected from such processes.

Fundamental to the ability to bring off such an achievement has been the astounding productivity of modern technology especially in the last century. The result has been a society that finds it natural and desirable to carry specialization of all functions to undreamed-of heights, and to find its rewards for doing so in material — i.e., quantitatively-defined -satisfactions. There is no aspect of social existence that has been left untouched — my own inclination is to say, undamaged — by the resulting dominance of quantitative criteria.

Not only to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, do we know the quantities of everything and the qualities of nothing; we both analyze and attempt to resolve what problems we perceive in quantitative terms. (There was a time when it appeared that, with the help of the Kinsey Report, we were about to make our judgments even on sexual morality by the statistical frequencies of various sexual patterns.) “Science is measurement,” we are told, by those who believe it; and they are numerous. But even if that were all there is to science — which is not so — it is important 1) to discover what it is that is measured and what left unmeasured, and 2) to inquire as to what motivates the measuring process.

For example, it was not until very recently that economics attempted seriously to measure, even to define, the numbers of poor. When they began, it swiftly became evident that our measuring techniques were (as they are still) inadequate to that task, as it also became evident that the definition of poverty was at the same time narrowly quantitative and largely politic. The economists identify and count the poor, and try to relate their condition to their economic function. They ask who, and how many, and believe they are asking why. But to ask why is to ask a question that is simultaneously historical, sociological, political, psychological, economic, and ethical. And it is to do so not with a politic definition, handed down by a government agency, but by human concern. The latter is of course more difficult to frame, cannot help but be controversial, and requires explicitness regarding the values of the inquirer. An adequate process of inquiry into poverty would have as its simplest problem that of measurement, and its results would probably include considerably more in the way of qualitative than of quantitative conclusions. It is my own view that the conclusions would also stand as an indictment of our society. And that takes me away from this example and back to an earlier assertion; namely, that both the general dimensions of our crisis and the means of its resolution are economic. (As it is equally clear that for those means to be utilized effectively will require much in the way of political transformation and effort.)

What is meant is both simpler and more complicated than the statement itself suggests. Economic achievement has swept through all corners of society, and has been able to do so because it had the brooms of modern technology to clear the way. One consequence is that the social sciences have become varieties of political arithmetic. Another is that older values have been vitiated in practice by redefinition into quantitative terms. Still another consequence has been the widespread recognition that “for the first time in human history enough metabolic and mechanical energy is available to provide high standards of living for everyone in North America almost immediately and everyone in the world within forty years, even considering the population explosion.”⁶

A philosopher, not an economist wrote those words. If he is right, and many of us think he is, a larger question emerges. If modern technology has made these things possible, why is it that none of us really believes that what is possible will take place? Indeed, why do so many of us sit convinced that far from things moving in desirable directions they are likely to accelerate in their already fearsome ways? If the answers to such questions are to come forth, they will come forth systematically and convincingly only from trained social scientists, and not least among those making a contribution must be economic historians.

What they will all have to comprehend is the unprecedentedly rapid rate of structural change in this century -structural change within the economy, between the economy and other aspects of life, within those other aspects of life (the “areas” cited above), and as between the United States and the rest of the world. What finally has to be comprehended is the relationship of all those changes to what seems to be our central problem: what is desirable and possible economically is also highly improbable.

Let me cite a few questions that therefore need answering, all of them requiring that the economic historian relate economic to non-economic matters. In this century there has been a vast and rapid rural to urban migration, a decline of agriculture in relative terms in our economy, a rapid growth of cities and an evident process of deep racial oppression and unrest in, along with the strangulation of, those cities. Students attack the universities for their deadness as academic centers and their liveliness as participants in the military-industrial complex. They drop out, drug themselves, and turn against their elders and the system as a whole; the family disintegrates. Blacks reject not only white advice, but white politics, culture, and standards. The churches are torn from within, over questions of authority and ethics, and the referent of the latter comes down to those other matters cited, and what stance the religious should have regarding them.

None of these developments can be explained by examining only economic affairs. But can any of them be explained without taking heavy account of our economic development? And can our economic development be understood without taking due account of changing structures and relationships between the economy and politics, education, demography, ethical transformation, etc.? How, for example, did the term “military-industrial complex” become transformed from a startling expression, less than a decade ago, into an accepted and basic characteristic of American society? And what are the historical roots of that development, its relationships with racial, university, and other problems?

Such questions cannot be pursued effectively without guiding hypotheses, an analytical framework, theory. Must we begin from scratch in those regards, or can we by taking our purposes firmly in hand, find substantial assistance in what has already been thought, and done? I believe the more optimistic assessment is the correct one, if we understand its implications.

The first among these is neither the most difficult nor the simplest. It is that we become conscious of our purposes, and that those purposes be the understanding of society as a means of allowing us to find ways to realize fundamental values. Are those values impossible to state, in such a way as to achieve widespread agreement? Perhaps; but among social scientists we might at worst find contending groups, a resolution healthier and more promising than the current state of indifference or superficial agreement. The group in which I would find myself would seek a working combination of the following: democracy, freedom, equality, material well-being, peace, and a society encouraging individual creativity and diversity, with a wide dispersion of power. To make the position clear, I do not believe that any of these, let alone their combination, may be found in the United States today, except superficially and restrictively. Just as I am sure that many social scientists would honestly disagree with my position on such matters, I am equally sure that many would not. I should like to work with the latter, but the present state of the social sciences, far from encouraging such cooperation, denies the need for it.

Second among the implications of doing important, essential, and effective work is the need to take what social theory we have that suits our purposes and test it, elaborate it, understand it, and modify its assumptions for current conditions. For some this might mean Marxian, for others Veblenian, for others Freudian, and for still others Parsonian and Weberian theories — to mention no others, of which there are doubtless many. We cannot expect a social genius to appear, that being something modern society is least likely to produce; we can expect that extant theories can be examined critically, combined, even abandoned, with serious testing. Third, what is meant by testing?

The trite observation that the laboratory of the social scientist is the past is no less true for being trite. But that notion does not exclude the “present” anymore than it sets aside any particular time or place in the past as the location of the laboratory. What does determine the time and the location of historical inquiry for these purposes is just that: our purposes. Thus, I do not believe that twentiethcentury America can be understood without studying that time and place; but neither is it plausible to expect adequate understanding of twentieth-century America by studying only that time and place. Whatever else the uses of history may be, they are the laboratory of the social scientist in a very special sense: History does not of course repeat itself; but a study of different times and places asking the same kinds of questions does allow us to know what kinds of key relationships to explore in other times and places (including our own), assuming we know what we are trying to understand.

If I may be forgiven a personal example to illustrate the foregoing, I have found it illuminating to study fourteenthcentury Lombardy, thirteenth-century Bologna, and parts of nineteenth-century Europe in terms of one large, but still particular, relationship; and I have been motivated to do so by a tentative hypothesis. The relationship is that between the sources, structure, and uses of power on the one hand, and the interacting process of economic development on the other. I have been led to study such relationships under the guidance of social theory (Marx and Veblen, mostly) and with the stimulus of what I take to be a central problem of our own time — namely, the growing struggle in all quarters between the powerful and the powerless, and the manner in which that relates to economic affairs. If I have come to any conclusions they are mostly that the relationships I study have yet to be understood by anyone, let alone myself, that their understanding is vital to any understanding of society, that such understanding requires the cooperative work of people trained in the other social sciences, and, finally, that such an inquiry is very promising — as part of a still larger inquiry into the processes of social change.

I begged your forgiveness for relating this personal history for the usual reasons of modesty, but also for a more important reason. I do not believe that my way is the only way, let alone the best way, for others. I do believe, however, that it is the best way for me, and an instance of the kind of thing others might find suitable, if any or all of us are to get a solid grip on the process of understanding how society moves and changes, with what problems and possibilities — given our values.

For social scientists, and among them economic historians, to move along the suggested lines would constitute and require a reconstruction of a large part of the field. But if, as seems clear, our society is in need of reconstruction, what more is being said than that now — as always — the university reflects and serves the society?

*or for a variety of corporations, trade unions, or government agencies. As the scope of business activities has broadened, e.g., and specialization has narrowed the focus of the economist, the purposes of the former and the methodology of the latter have made for a happy wedding, with society the only loser. return to text

1“Recent Contributions to Economic History: The United States, the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History, XIX (March, 1959), 64-75. return to text

2J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1961, p. 194. return to text

3Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning In America, Sagamore Press, New York, 1957, pp. 135-36. Originally published in 1918, the book is understood to have been completed by 1908. return to text

4John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1965, pp. vi and viii.
return to text

5Richard G. Lipsey and Peter O. Steiner, Economics, Harper & Row, Second Edition, New York, 1969, p. 9. This is a highly regarded and increasingly popular textbook. return to text

6Huston Smith, “LIKE IT IS: The University Today,” The Key Reporter, Winter, 1968–69, p. 3. return to text

June 23, 2003