Category: Economists

Categories
Columbia Economists Suggested Reading Syllabus

Columbia. National accounting. Course outline and readings. Barger, 1963-64

 

Harold Barger was, at least up through 2003, one of the last (if not the last) economics professor to teach in the interdisciplinary core course for Columbia undergraduates, Contemporary Civilization. Similar to the University of Chicago where undergraduate and graduate teaching in economics were strictly segregated, Columbia University’s economics faculty (see Peter Kenen’s description below) was either teaching for the college or for the university. Harold Barger was one of the few exceptions to work both sides of that street. In addition to the official Columbia obituary that gives some sense of the man, I provide a transcription of his syllabus on national economic accounts in this post.

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Barger taught both undergrads and graduate students

Peter Kenen’s description of undergraduate economics education at Columbia at mid-century:

Unfortunately, the Economics Department at Columbia was different from most others there. It was divided sharply between those who taught graduate courses and those who taught undergraduates. There were exceptions. Harold Barger, who taught money and banking, also gave a graduate course on national-income accounting, and C. Lowell Harriss, who taught public finance, gave a graduate course on state and local taxation. But Columbia’s most prominent economists, Ragnar Nurkse, Carl Shoup, Arthur Burns and William Vickrey, to name only a few, did not teach undergraduate courses and did not encourage undergraduates to take their graduate courses. Furthermore, the undergraduate programme did not greatly emphasize econmic theory, because some of its members were overtly hostile to it. The senior seminar, conducted by Horace Taylor, was devoted mainly to the works of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons and other institutionalists.

Source: Chapter 12, “Peter B. Kenen” in Exemplary Economists: North America , Vol. 1 edited by Roger Backhouse and Roger Middleton (Edward Elgar, 2000), p. 259.

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Harold Barger (1907-1989)
Columbia University Obituary

Harold Barger, former chairman of Columbia’s department of economics and the first director of the University’s Paris center, died Aug. 9 at his home in Kinderhook, N.Y., after a long illness. He was 82.

Barger taught at Columbia almost 40 years, beginning in 1937 as an instructor in economics. He became an assistant professor in 1943, associate professor in 1947 and professor in 1954. Chairman of the economics department from 1961 to 1964 and acting chairman from 1969 to 1970, he had been professor emeritus since his retirement in 1975.

Barger directed Columbia’s Paris campus, Reid Hall, for a year after it was acquired by the University in 1964. Located in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the center houses undergraduate programs of Columbia, Barnard and various other U.S. colleges and universities.

A faculty member of Columbia College from 1943 to 1975, Barger was assistant to the dean of the College from 1954 to 1959. From 1959 to 1964, he was a faculty adviser at the College.

“I remember Harold Barger most for his integrity and total devotion to the University, especially Columbia College,” said Columbia economics professor Donald Dewey. “He always looked out for the interests of students at the College.”

Albert Hart, Columbia professor emeritus of economics, said: “He had a very broad interest in the field of economics and his lectures were full of substance. He was very precise and knew how to organize material.”

Harold Barger was born Apr. 27, 1907, in London. He received the B.A. from Cambridge in 1930 and the Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1937. He was a lecturer at the University of London from 1931 to 1936 and from 1938 to 1939.

A specialist in monetary policy and income and employment theory, Barger served as a consultant to the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Mines. He conducted studies for the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1940 to 1954 and served in the Office of Strategic Services of the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945. From 1945 to 1946, he was an assistant division chief for the State Department.

Barger was the author of numerous articles and books on economics, including the textbook Money, Banking and Public Policy(1962). He coauthored his last book, College on Credit (1981), with his wife, Gwyneth.

Barger was married to the former Anne Macdonald Walls, who died in 1954. In 1955, he married Gwyneth Evans Kahn, who survives him. Other survivors include two nieces and a nephew.

A memorial service was held at Spencertown Academy in Spencertown, N.Y., on Aug. 26. In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center or the Chamber Music Series of Spencertown Academy.

Source: Columbia University Record. Vol. 15, No. 1 (8 September 1989), p. 6.

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ECONOMICS G4431x
Professor Barger
1963-1964

THE MEASUREMENT OF INCOME AND WEALTH

Students should possess the following books containing required readings (marked *):

Richard Ruggles, National Income Accounts and Income Analysis (2nd ed. 1956, $6.50)

Survey of Current Business, Supplement, “US Income and Output,” 1958 (Government Printing Office, $1.50).

The following books also contain required readings (marked *):

Colin Clark, National Income and Outlay

International Association for Research in Income and Wealth,Income and Wealth, Series I, VIII.

National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vols. II, VI, VIII, XII, XLV, XX.

A.C. Pigou, Economics of Welfare, 3rd (1929) or subsequent edition.

Richard Stone, Role of Measurement in Economics.

Simon Kuznets, Economic Change.

United Nations, National Income and its Distribution in Underdeveloped Countries (1951).

Milton Gilbert and I.B. Kravis, International Comparison of National Products (1954; reissued 1957 as Comparative National Products and Price Levels).

Alexander Eckstein, The National Income of Communist China.

Abram Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia Since 1928.

U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, “Comparisons of the U.S. and Soviet Economies,” Papers submitted by Panelists, Parts I and II, 1959 (Government Printing Office, $1.45).

The following books contain recommended readings:

John P. Powelson, Economic Accounting.

Harold Barger, Outlay and Income in the United States (NBER Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol IV).

James C. Bonbright, Valuation of Property, Vol. I.

Simon Kuznets, National Income and its Composition; National Income Since 1869.

Wassily Leontief, Structure of the American Economy.

National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vols. III, X, XVIII.

International Association for Research in Income and Wealth,Income and Wealth, Series II, III, IV.

Survey of Current Business, 1954 National Income Supplement.

 

  1. INCOME
    1. ELEMENTARY IDEAS: HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT: RELATION OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTING TO WELFARE
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 3-15
      2. *Clark, Chap. X
      3. *Pigou, Part I, Chaps. I, II
      4. Phyllis Deane in Economic Development and Cultural Change 1955, pp. 3-38
      5. Phyllis Deane, Economic History Rev. 1956, pp. 339-354; Apr. 1957, pp. 451-461
    2. FUNDAMENTALS OF ACCOUNTING
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 16-44
      2. Powelson, Ch. 1-8
    3. THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTS
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 45-106
      2. *Stone, “Functions and Criteria” in International Association Series I, or Stone, Role of Measurement, pp. 38-60
      3. Powelson, Chaps. 9, 10, 15, 16
    4. GNP AND NATIONAL INCOME AS ACCOUNTING CONCEPTS
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 107-131
      2. *“U.S. Income and Output,” pp. 50-69; 114-116
      3. Powelson, Chs. 17-20
      4. Copeland in Studies, Vol. XX, pp. 19-111
    5. RELATION OF NATIONAL INCOME ACCOUNTING TO INPUT-OUTPUT AND MONEY FLOW ANALYSIS
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 187-210
      2. Studies, Vol. XVIII, especially pp. 137-182, 253-320
      3. Leontief, Structure of the American Economy
    6. THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING INCOME
      1. *Pigou, Part I, Chs. III, IV
      2. *Haberler and Hagen in Studies, Vol. VIII, pp. 3-31
      3. *Hance, in Studies, Vol. VI, pp. 238-270
      4. Kuznets, “Government Product and National Income” in International Association, Series I
      5. Kuznets, National Income and its Composition, Ch. I
      6. 1954 National Income Supplement, pp. 40-60
    7. STATISTICAL MEASUREMENTS
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 158-186
      2. *“U.S. Income and Output,” pp. 70-105
      3. Goldsmith in Studies, Vol. III, pp. 220-244
      4. Kuznets, National Product since 1869, Parts I and II
        ______, National Income and its Composition, Chs. 3, 12
      5. 1954 National Income Supplement, pp. 61-152
      6. Barger, Ch. III and pp. 302-04
    8. THE DEFLATION PROBLEM AND INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
      1. *Ruggles, pp. 131-143
      2. *Pigou, Part I, Chs. V-VII
      3. *Gilbert and Kravis, pp. 13-33, 61-95
    9. NATIONAL INCOME MEASUREMENTS IN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES
      1. *Kuznets, Economic Change, pp. 145-191, 216-252
      2. *United Nations, Chs. I and II
      3. *Kravis in Studies, Vol. XX, pp. 349-400
      4. *Eckstein, pp. 1-90
      5. Rao in International Association, Series III
    10. NATIONAL INCOME IN SOVIET RUSSIA
      1. *Bergson, pp. 1-298
      2. *Joint Economic Committee, Part I (Campbell, Nutter, Turgeon) and Part II (Bornstein, Boddy)
  1. WEALTH
    1. THE ESTIMATION OF NATIONAL WEALTH
      1. *Kuznets in Studies, Vol. II, pp. 3-82
      2. *Goldsmith and Hart in Studies, Vol. XII, pp. 23-186
      3. *Goldsmith in Studies, Vol. XIV, pp. 5-73
      4. Goldsmith in International Association, Series II and IV
      5. International Association, Series VIII, pp. 1-59
      6. Bonbright, Vol. I, Chs. I-XII
      7. Kuznets, National Income since 1869, pp. 185-234

Source: Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library. William Vickrey Papers, Box 35, Folder “Columbia Correspondence, 1947-1969”.

Image Source: Harold Barger from J. W. Smit “Wisdom, Training and Contemporary Civilization”, Columbia College Today (November 2003).

Categories
Economists M.I.T. Socialism Suggested Reading Syllabus

M.I.T. Reading list on theory of central planning. Weitzman, 1977

 

 

This morning I learned from Twitter that two days ago (August 27, 2019) my second thesis adviser, Marty Weitzman had died. While I was never personally close to him, he played an enormous role in my development as an economist and I am saddened by this news. What I particularly admired in Weitzman was the fact that his formal mathematical modelling was never far from his profound economic intuition with respect to the problems he addressed. He was not a great teacher in the way Bob Solow and Stan Fischer were great. But he was able to transmit a sense of the importance of what he was teaching as well as bringing a contagious enthusiasm into the classroom. Marty Weitzman was economic theory à la M.I.T. made flesh. Today, in his memory, I have transcribed an old mimeographed list of suggested readings for his course on the economic theory of central planning.

Course materials from Martin Weitzman’s half-semester core course in microeconomic theory from 1973 and 1974 at M.I.T. have been posted earlier:

Course outline from 1974.
Final exam from 1974.
Final exam from 1973.

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Martin Weitzman’s Werke

Martin L. Weitzman’s c.v. (from October 2018)

Links to most (all?) of Weitzman’s papers at the Wayback Machine archived webpage.

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14.783 THEORY OF CENTRAL PLANNING
Spring 1977
M. L. Weitzman

Reading List of Suggested References

  1. Theoretical Background (Convexity, Programming, Efficiency Prices)

Koopmans, T. C., Essay I in Three Essays on the State of Economic Science.

Baumol, W. J., Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, 3rd ed., chapters 5-8, 12, 20, 21.

Manne, A. S., Economic Analysis for Business Decisions, chapters 2, 3.

Bator, F., “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Economics”, AER, March 1957.

Intriligator, M. D., Mathematical Optimization and Economic Theory.

Dorfman, R., Samuelson, P.A., and Solow, R. M., Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, chapters 6-8.

Kantorovich, L. V., The Best Use of Economic Resources, Harvard, 1965.

Kornai, J., Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions, Part 1, chapters 1-4.

Dantzig, G. B., Linear Programming and Extensions, chapters 3, 12.

Gale, D., The Theory of Linear Economic Models.

Malinvaud, E., Lectures on Microeconomic Theory, chapters 1, 3,4,5.

  1. General Discussion of Planning Problems

Hayek, F. A., “The Price System as a Mechanism for Using Knowledge”, in Bornstein (ed.), Comparative Economic Systems: Models and Cases.

Lange, O., “On the Economic Theory of Socialism”, in Bornstein (ed.), Comparative Economic Systems: Models and Cases.

Hurwicz, L., “The Design of Mechanisms for Resource Allocation”, AER, May 1973.

Heal, G. M., The Theory of Economic Planning, chapters 1, 2.

Kornai, J., Anti-Equilibrium, chapters 23, 24.

Hurwicz, L., “Conditions for Economic Efficiency of Centralized and Decentralized Structures”, in G. Grossman (ed.), Value and Plan.

Krouse, C., “Complex Objectives, Decentralization, and the Decision Process of Organizations”, ASQ (vol. 17).

Arrow, K. J., “Control in Large Organizations”, Management Science, April 1964.

Masse, P., “The French Plan and Economic Theory”, Econometrica, April 1965.

Kornai, J., Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions, chapters 22-27.

Kornai, J., “Thoughts on Multi-Level Planning Systems”, in Goreux and Manne (eds.), Multi-Level Planning: Case Studies in Mexico.

  1. Multi-Level Planning Algorithms

Malinvaud, E., “Decentralized Procedures for Planning”, in Malinvaud (ed.), Activity Analysis in the Theory of Growth and Planning.

Arrow, K. J. and Hurwicz, L., “Decentralization and Computation in Resource Allocation”, in Pfouts (ed.), Essays in Economics and Econometrics.

Malinvaud, E., Lectures in Microeconomic Theory, chapter 8.

Heal, G., “Planning Without Prices”, REStud, 36, 1969, pp. 347-362.

Weitzman, M. L., Toward a Theory of Iterative Economic Planning, Part I, MIT Ph.D. Thesis, June 1967.

Dantzig, G. B., Linear Programming and Extensions, chapters 23, 25. (Decomposition and Uncertainty).

Baumol, W. J., and Fabian, T., “Decomposition Pricing for Decentralization and External Economies”, Management Science, September 1964.

Kornai, J., “Mathematical Programming and Long Term Plans in Hungary”, in Malinvaud (ed.), Activity Analysis in the Theory of Growth and Planning.

Weitzman, M. L., “Iterative Multilevel Planning with Production Targets”, Econometrica, January 1970.

Kornai, J., “Multi-Level Programming: A First Report on the Model and on the Experimental Calculations”, European Economic Review, Fall 1969.

Heal, G. M., The Theory of Economic Planning, chapters 3-9.

  1. Prices vs. Quantities

Koopmans, T. C., “Uses of Prices”, pp. 243-257 in Scientific Papers of Tjalling C. Koopmans.

Kornai, J., Anti-Equilibrium, chapter 3 (“The Basic Concepts of General Equilibrium Theory”).

Marglin, S., “Information in Price and Command Systems of Planning”, in Margolis (ed.), Conference on the Analysis of the Public Sector, Biarritz, Switzerland [sic], 1966.

Whinston, A., “Price Guides in Decentralized Organizations,”, in Cooper et. al. (eds.), New Perspectives in Organization Research.

Solow, R. M., “The Economist’s Approach to Pollution and its Control”, Science, August, 1971.

Ruff, L. E., “The Economic Common Sense of Pollution”, The Public Interest, Spring 1970.

Weitzman, M. L., “Prices vs. Quantities”, REStud, 1974 (copies on reserve).

  1. Organization, Revelation, and Control

Arrow, K. J., The Limits of Organization.

Marschak, J. and Radner, R., Economic Theory of Teams. (Just scan to get basic ideas.)

Weitzman, M. L., “Optimal Revenue Functions for Economic Regulation”, copies on reserve. [published in AER, September 1973]

Kwerel, E. R., “To Tell the Truth: Imperfect Information and Optimal Pollution Control”, copies on reserve. [published in REStud, 1977]

Groves, T., “On the Possibility of Effective Collective Choice with Compensation”, on reserve.

Weitzman, M., “The New Soviet Incentive Model”, Bell Journal, Spring 1976.

  1. Input-Output Theory and the Non-Substitution Theorem

Gale, D., The Theory of Linear Economic Models, chapter 9, sections 1-3.

Dorfman, R., P. A. Samuelson, and R. M. Solow, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, chapters 9, 10.

Chenery, H. B. and P. G. Clark, Interindustry Economics.

Kornai, J., Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions, chapter 3.

Brody, A., Proportions, Prices and Planning, section 3.2. (Thoughts on Planning).

Weitzman, M. L., “On Choosing an Optimal Technology”, Management Science, January 1967.

Manove, M., “Soviet Pricing, Profits, and Technological Change”, Review of Economic Studies (copies on reserve).

  1. Materials Balancing

Montias, J. M., Planning with Material Balances in Soviet-Type Economies”, AER, December 1959.

Levine, H. S., “The Centralized Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry”, reprinted in Holtzman (ed.), Readings in the Soviet Economy, or Bornstein and Fusfeld (eds.), The Soviet Economy: A Book of Readings.

Montias, J. M., “On the Consistency and Efficiency of Central Plans”, REStud, October 1962.

Sherman, H. J., The Soviet Economy, chapter 6 and pp. 247-256.

Manove, M., “A Model of Soviet-Type Planning”, AER, June 1971.

  1. Pressure, Rationing, and Inventories

Levine, H. S., “Pressure and Planning in the Soviet Economy”, in Rosovsky (ed.), Industrialization in Two Systems.

Hunter, H., “Optimum Tautness in Developmental Planning”, Economic Development and Cultural Change, July 1961.

Dolan, E. G., “The Teleological Period in Soviet Economic Planning”, Yale Economic Essays, Spring 1970.

Weitzman, M. L., “Materials Balances Under Uncertainty”, QJE, May 1971.

Manove, M., “A Theory of Non-Price Rationing of Intermediate Goods with Reference to Soviet-Type Economies”, Econometrica, September 1973.

Powell, R. P., “Plan Execution and the Workability of Soviet Planning”, Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 1, no. 1, 1977.

Keren, M., “On the Tautness of Plans”, REStud, October 1972.

  1. Economic Planning with Non-Convexities

Dantzig, G. B., “On the Significance of Solving Linear Programming Problems with some Integer Variables”, sections 26-33 in Linear Programming and Extensions.

Baumol, W. J., Economic Theory and Operations Research, 3rd ed., chapter 8.

Chenery, H. B., “The Interdependence of Investment Decisions”, in Abramovitz (ed.), The Allocation of Economic Resources.

Vietorisz, T., “Decentralization and Project Evaluation under Economies of Scale and Indivisibilities”, United Nations, Industrialization and Productivity Bulletin No. 12 [1968].

Davis, R. E., D. A. Kendrick, and M. Weitzman, “A Branch and Bound Algorithm for Zero-One Mixed Integer Programming Problems”, Operations Research, July-August 1971.

Manne, A., Investments for Capacity Expansion, MIT Press, 1967.

Weitzman, M. L., “The Optimal Development of Resource Pools”, JET, June 1976.

Chenery, H. B. and Westphal, L., “Economies of Scale and Investment Over Time”, in Margolis and Guitton (eds.), Public Economics.

Source: Personal copy of Irwin Collier.

Image Source: Martin Weitzman’s Harvard webpage (archived May 29, 2014).

Categories
Columbia Economists NBER

Columbia Alumnus Arthur F. Burns applies to NBER for Research Associateship, 1930

 

 

Arthur F. Burns was twenty-five years old when he submitted the following application for a Research Associate position that provided 11 months funding at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Results from this project would be ultimately incorporated into Burns’ doctoral dissertation published as the NBER monograph Production Trends in the United States Since 1870 (1934).

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Arthur F. Burns’ late NBER application forwarded to Edwin Gay

National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

February 25, 1930

Dr. Edwin F. Gay
117 Widener Library
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Dr. Gay:

The attached application of Mr. Arthur Frank Burns has just been received. Athough the time limit has passed, you might wish to consider it, and I am therefore forwarding it to you.

Yours very truly,
[signed] G. R. Stahl
Executive Secretary

GRS:RD

[handwritten note]
[Frederick C.] Mills knows something about this man and regards him favorably.

_____________________

NBER Research Associate Application of Arthur F. Burns
(February, 1930)

National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

51 Madison Avenue
New York

RESEARCH ASSOCIATES’ APPLICATION FORM

Applications and accompanying documents should be sent by registered mail and must reach Directors of Research not later than February 1, 1930. Six typewritten copies (legible carbons) should accompany each formal application.

Candidates should have familiarized themselves with the main objects and work of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Candidates are expected to be in good health, free from physical or nervous troubles, and able to complete their work in New York without predictable interruption.

Research Associates will not accept other remunerative employment while connected with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Candidates’ names should be written plainly on each manuscript.

Title of Project

A Study of Long-Time Indexes of Production

Name of Candidate

Arthur Frank Burns

Date of Application

February 21, 1930

 

THE CANDIDATE

PERSONAL HISTORY:

Name in full: Arthur Frank Burns
Home address: 34 Bethune St., New York City
Present occupation: University teaching
Place of birth: Stanislawow, Poland
Date of birth: April 27, 1904
If not a native-born citizen, date and place of naturalization: About 1920; Bayonne, New Jersey
Single, married: Married
Name and address of wife or husband: Helen, 34 Bethune Street
Name and address of nearest kin if unmarried: [blank]
Number, relationship, and ages of dependents: [blank]

Name the colleges and universities you have attended; length of residence in each; also major and minor studies pursued.

Columbia College, Sept. 1921-Feb. 1925. Majors—Economics, German. Minors—English, History
Columbia University, Feb. 1925-June 1927. Major—Economics. Minor—Statistics.

List the degrees you have received with the years in which they were conferred.

B.A.—Feb. 1925
M.A.—Oct. 1925

Give a list of scholarships or fellowships previously held or now held, stating in each case place and period of tenure, studies pursued and amount of stipend:

Columbia College Scholarship, 1921-1924. $250 per annum
Gilder Fellowship, Academic Year 1926-1927, Columbia University. Stipend $1200. Chief study pursued—Monetary Theory

What foreign languages are you able to use?

French and German

 

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

Give a list of positions you have held—professional, teaching, scientific, administrative, business:

Name of Institution

Title of Position

Years of Tenure
Columbia University

Instructor in Extension

Feb. 1926-June 1927

Soc. Science Res. Co.

 Report on Periodicals Summer of 1927
Rutgers University Instructor

1927 to date

Of what learned or scientific societies are you a member?

Phi Beta Kappa
American Statistical Society

Describe briefly the advanced work and research you have already done in this country or abroad, giving dates, subjects, and names of your principal teachers in these subjects:

Master’s essay on Employment Statistics, under Professors F.A. Ross and W.C. Mitchell, in 1925
Studies in the field of Business Cycles, under Professor W.C. Mitchell, 1926 to date
Studies in the field of Monetary Theory, under Professors Mitchell and Willis, 1926-1927
Work on Negro Migration, under Professor F.A. Ross, Summer of 1925
Work on Instalment Selling, under Professor E.R.A. Seligman, Summer of 1926
Report on Social Science Periodicals for the Social Science Research  Council, under Professor F. Stuart Chapin, Summer of 1927.

Submit a list of your publications with exact titles, names of publishers and dates and places of publication:

See separate sheet on publications

THE PROJECT

PLANS FOR STUDY:

Submit a statement (six copies) giving detailed plans for the study you would pursue during your tenure of an Associateship. This statement should include:

(1) A description of the project including its character and scope, and the significance of its presumable contribution to knowledge. Describe how the inquiry is to be conducted, major expected sources of information, etc.
(2) The present state of the project, time of commencement, progress to date, and expectation as to completion.
(3) A proposed budget showing the amount of any assistance, whether of a statistical or clerical nature, or traveling expense that you would require to complete your project.

REFERENCES:

Submit a list of references

(1) from whom information may be obtained concerning your qualifications, and
(2) from whom expert opinion may be obtained as to the value and practicability of your proposed studies.

_____________________

Arthur F. Burns

THE PROJECT
A Study of Long-Time Indexes of Production

            Several years ago I embarked upon an inquiry into the broad problem “The Relationship between ‘Price’ and ‘Trade’ Fluctuations.” The study had two main purposes: (1) to provide a systematic description and analysis of one structural element of the “business cycle,” (2) to determine and appraise the empirical basis for the widely held view that “business stability” may be attained through the “stabilization of the price level.” But soon enough I found it difficult to adhere to the project that I had formulated. The task in the course of execution in the statistical laboratory loomed more formidable than in the “arm-chair” in which it found its inception. But another circumstance proved even more compelling in bring about a restriction of the area of the investigation: no sooner was a small segment of the plan that served as my procedural guide completed, but a host of new queries, not at all envisaged in the original plan, arose and pressed for an answer. Thus, impelled by considerations of a practical sort—working as I did single-handed, and by a growing curiosity, I subjected the project to successive reductions of scope. The present project, “A Study of Long-Time Indexes of Production,” is the untouched, and perhaps an unrecognizable, remainder of the original inquiry. On this limited project I have been at work intermittently for about a year and a half.

            The object of the present project is to study the “secular changes” in “general production” in the United States, and thereby throw light on one important constituent aspect of the trend of “economic welfare.” The establishment of a theory of secular change in general production calls, in the main, for the performance of two tasks. In the first place, the rate of growth of the physical volume of production and its variation have to be determined. In the second place, the empirical generalizations so arrived at have to be interpreted. The general plan of the investigation is built around these two problems; but to perform these tasks adequately, a host of subsidiary problems have to be met.

            Some details of the organization of the project, as well as the point to which work on the project has been carried thus far, may best be indicated by setting forth the extent to which the tentative individual chapters have been completed. The first chapter treats of the contents of the concept “economic welfare,” and traces, analytically and historically, problems in the measurement thereof; this chapter is practically finished. The materials for the second chapter, which is devoted to the history of production indexes, have, for the greater part, already been collected; and a preliminary draft of the chapter has been completed. Much of the third chapter, which is concerned with an analysis of a conceptually ideal measure of the physical volume of production, and the special bearing of this analysis on long-time indexes of production, is written; this chapter is to be but an extension of the paper on “The Measurement of the Physical Volume of Production,” which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 1930. In the fourth chapter, an analysis of the available long-time indexes of production is made; this chapter covers a much more extensive area than the brief reference to it may lead one to suppose; and though several months of continuous work have already been devoted to it, considerable literary research and statistical routine remain. The fifth and six chapters will present the results of the computations on the rate of secular change in physical production; though much ground has been covered (over one hundred trends have already been determined), even more remains to be done. Of the next and final two chapters, in which an interpretation of the computed results is to be offered, very little has been put into written form; but a substantial body of literature has been abstracted; and a preliminary outline of some portions of the theory to be presented, now that many of the calculations are completed, has been worked out.

            It will be apparent from this statement of the work already done on the project that it has reached a point where completion by the middle of 1931 may well be expected. In fact, the freedom to pursue the investigation unencumbered by academic duties may make possible a more intensive cultivation of the demarcated field than is presently contemplated; or, if it be deemed advisable, an extension of the investigation, now confined to the United States, to several other countries for which what appear to be reasonably satisfactory materials have of late become available.

            Needless to say, the above statement of the project constitutes no more than a report on its present status. There probably will be modifications of some importance. One change, in fact, is now being seriously considered: the replacement of Chapters II and III by a brief section, to be worked into the introductory chapter, to the end that a nicer balance between the divisions on, what may be described as, “data and method” and “results” be achieved.

            In continuing with this study there will be no travelling expenses to speak of. At the most, there will be a trip or two to Washington. It goes without saying that the study will proceed more rapidly if clerical assistance is had. Only a single statistical clerk would be needed, and a halftime clerk might suffice.

_____________________

Arthur F. Burns

References

Group I

Professor Robert E. Chaddock, Columbia University
Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, Columbia University
Professor H. Parker Willis, Columbia University
Professor Eugene E. Agger, Rutgers University
Professor Frank W. Taussig, Harvard University

Group II

Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, Columbia University
Professor Wilford I. King, New York University
Mr. Carl Snyder, New York Federal Reserve Bank
Dr. Edmund E. Day, Social Science Research Council
Dr. Simon Kuznets, National Bureau of Economic Research

_____________________

Arthur F. Burns

Publications

A Note on Comparative Costs, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May, 1928

The Duration of Business Cycles, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1929

The Geometric Mean of Percentages, Journal of the American Statistical Association, September, 1929

The Ideology of Businessmen and Presidential Elections, Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly, September, 1929.

Thus Spake the Professor of Statistics, Social Science, November, 1929

The Quantity Theory and Price Stabilization, American Economic Review, December, 1929

The Relative Importance of Check and Cash Payments in the United States: 1919-1928, Journal of the American Statistical Association, December, 1929

The Measurement of the Physical Volume of Production, Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 1930

_____________________

Reference Letter:  H. P. Willis

Columbia University
in the City of New York
School of Business

February 27, 1930.

Mr. G. R. Stahl,
Executive Secretary,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
51 Madison Avenue,
New York City.

My dear Mr. Stahl:

            I have received your letter of February 26. Mr. Arthur F. Burns, whom you mention, was a student here some years ago, passed his doctorate examination with money and banking as one of his topics. I had general supervision of his work in money and banking and also came into contact with him individually now and then. I thought him a specially acute and capable student of the subject and it seemed to me that he had rather unusual research ability. He has been teaching, I believe, at Rutgers University for a couple of years past and during that time he has occasionally written articles in the scientific magazines and has sent me copies. I have read them with substantial interest and have thought that they showed steady growth in the grasp of the subject and in ability to present it.

            I do not know exactly what kind of work you would be disposed to assign him in your bureau were you to appoint him, and hence it is difficult for me to give specific opinion of his “strong and weak points”, for strength and weakness are relative to the work to be done. I should suppose that in a statistical research relating to monetary and banking questions, and particularly to the price problem, Mr. Burns would be decidedly capable. I do not think of any elements of corresponding weakness that need to be emphasized, but perhaps you might find him less devoted to the necessary routine work that has to done in every statistical office, than you would to the planning of investigation and the initiation of inquiries in it. Put in another was this might be equivalent to saying that Mr. Burns is perhaps stronger in conception and planning than he is in execution and yet I do not know that he is in any way to be criticized for his power of execution. I simply mean that he does not seem to be as outstanding in that direction as he is in the other.

            I, however, commend him unreservedly to you as a capable man in connection with price, banking and credit research.

Yours very truly,
[signed] H. P. Willis

HPW:S

_____________________

Reference Letter:  Willford I. King

AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION

Secretary-Treasurer
Willford I. King
530 Commerce Building, New York Univ.
236 Wooster Street, New York City

February 27, 1930.

Mr. G. R. Stahl,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
51 Madison Avenue,
New York City.

Dear Mr. Stahl:

            I have met Mr. Arthur F. Burns two or three times but do not know very much about his record. One thing, however, stands out strongly in his favor. He recently published in the AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW a very fine piece of work on the equation of exchange. This indicates to me that he is competent to do research work of high quality.

Cordially yours,
Willford I. King.

WIK:RW

_____________________

Reference Letter: F. W. Taussig

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 28, 1930

Dear Mr. Stahl:

            I have a high opinion of A. F. Burns. I have watched his published work, and some I have examined with care. As will be noted, he has an article in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics which I consider first-rate. He is a keen critic, and handles figures well. He writes more than acceptably, and in my judgment gives promise of very good work in the future. You will have to go far to find a man clearly better.

Very truly yours,
[signed] F. W. Taussig

Mr. G. R. Stahl
National Bureau of Economic Research
51 Madison Avenue
New York City

_____________________

Reference Letter:  E. E. Agger

Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Department of Economics

March 5, 1930

Mr. G. R. Stahl,
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
51 Madison Avenue,
New York City

Dear Mr. Stahl:

            Replying to your letter of February 26th I may say that I have known Mr. Arthur F. Burns ever since his undergraduate days. He was one of my honor students when I was at Columbia and when he finished his graduate work I brought him to Rutgers as an Instructor. I think that he will be promoted to an Assistant Professorship next year.

            He has been a specialist in the field of Statistics and Economic Theory and would therefore, in my judgment, be ideally equipped for the post of Research Associate. He is meticulously careful and most painstaking. You are doubtless familiar with some of his writings during the past year or so. They have seemed to me excellent pieces of work. We shall sorely miss him should he ask for leave to accept possible appointment under you, but on the other hand, I believe that in the end it will add to his value to us, at the same time that you are getting the use of his services. In short, I recommend him without qualification.

Sincerely yours,
[Signed] E.E. Agger

EEA:H

_____________________

Reference Letter:  Carl Snyder

COPY
Thirty Three Liberty Street
New York

March 5, 1930

Dear Mr. Stahl:

            I have followed the work of Arthur F. Burns, of whom you wrote, with a great deal of interest. It seems to me careful, conscientious, well-planned work. He has the inquisitive mind, and that is the great thing. His ideas seem to me sound and his statistical methods well grounded.

            The problem in which he is interested is one in which we have done a great deal of work here, and I know of nothing of greater importance. I wish very cordially to endorse the recommendation for his appointment as a Research Associate.

Please believe me, with very best regards,

Sincerely yours,
Carl Snyder

Gustav R. Stahl, Esq.,
National Bureau of Economic Research
51 Madison Avenue, New York City

_____________________

Reference Letter:  Simon Kuznets

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
51 Madison Avenue, New York

March 3, 1930

Committee on Selection,
National Bureau of Economic Research
51 Madison Avenue,
New York City

Gentlemen:

            Arthur F. Burns who is applying for appointment as a Research Associate is my former classmate from Columbia University, and has always impressed me by his keen powers of observation and analysis. His work speaks for itself, for he has had opportunity to publish some of the by-products of his doctor’s thesis in the form of articles.

            He has a thorough statistical training, both in theory and in technique, for he has studied statistics, taught it, and applied its principles. He is also thoroughly versed in economic theory, having studied it under Professors W. C. Mitchell and H. L. Moore.

            On the whole, Mr. Burns is a candidate of high promise. He is still quite young in years, but is quite experienced in research work. He ought to prove equal to the opportunities which an appointment as a research associate will provide for him.

Yours respectfully
[signed] Simon Kuznets
[Research Staff member, NBER]

_____________________

Reference Letter:  Robert E. Chaddock

Columbia University
in the City of New York
Faculty of Political Science

March 3, 1930.

Mr. G. R. Stahl, Executive Secretary
National Bureau of Economic Research
51 Madison Avenue, New York City

Dear Mr. Stahl,

            I have expressed my opinion as to the qualifications of Cowden, Gayzer and Leong as candidates for Research Associate. Mr. Arthur F. Burns is superior to any of these in qualifications for research, in my opinion. All his inclinations and his critical attitude toward his own and the results of others point to research as his field. He has unusual technical preparation in Statistics and does not lose sight of the logical tests of his knowledge. He has been publishing articles constantly since entering upon his teaching at Rutgers University where he is successful as a teacher so far as I know. I would not rate him ahead of the candidates I have described before in matters of personality and personal contact, but I do regard him as a very superior candidate in respect to qualifications for research and scholarly productivity.

Sincerely yours,
[signed] Robert E. Chaddock

REC:CT

_____________________

Letter:  Edwin F. Gay to Arthur F. Burns

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
51 Madison Avenue, New York

June 25, 1930

Mr. A. F. Burns
34 Bethune Street
New York City

My dear Mr. Burns:

            At a recent meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Bureau it was decided that since all the members of the regular staff are not available until the end of September, the Research Associates should be asked to report here on October 1, 1930, instead of September 15. You may, of course, come earlier but full provision for your work cannot conveniently be made before the date indicated. The stipends of the Research Associates are to run from October 1, and also the salaries of such statistical assistants as are designated for the service of the Research Associates.

            Upon your arrival you are to report to Dr. Frederick C. Mills, who will have direct responsibility as your adviser. You will be free, of course, to consult with any of the members of the staff.

            In regard to arrangements for statistical and other assistance, you will consult with Mr. Pierce Williams, the Executive Director.

            It gives me great pleasure, in behalf of the directors and staff of the National Bureau, to welcome you as a research associate. We trust that you will find the eleven months with us not only scientifically profitable but personally enjoyable.

Sincerely yours,
[signed] Edwin F. Gay]
Director of Research

RD

[handwritten note] P.S In looking over your application, I [word illegible] certain [items?] which I think should be filled out. These are: the date of arrival in this country, precise date of naturalization; pre-college education.

Source: Duke University. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Economists’ Papers Archive. Arthur F. Burns Papers, Box 2, Folder “Correspondence/NBER, 1930”.  IMG_8329.JPG

Image Source: Duke University. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Economists’ Papers Archive. Arthur F. Burns Papers, Box 6. Folder “Photographs, B&W I”. Note: “1930s” written on back of photograph.

 

Categories
Economists Exam Questions Harvard

Harvard. Topics for the Ricardo Prize Examination, 1916

 

In an earlier post, JACOB VINER BEATS PAUL DOUGLAS FOR RICARDO PRIZE SCHOLARSHIP, 1916, we learned of a head-to-head competition between two young men who were to go on to become colleagues at the University of Chicago. Rummaging through Harvard Economics Department’s Correspondence & Papers, I happened to find a copy of the Ricardo Prize Examination topics for that 1916 examination in a folder where one would not have expected it to be filed. Now the record is more complete.

____________________

Ricardo Prize Exam. Will be Held in Upper Dane Tomorrow

The Ricardo Prize Scholarship examination will be held in Upper Dane Hall tomorrow at 2 o’clock. The scholarship is valued at $350, and is open to anyone who is this year a member of the University, and who will next year be either 8 member of the Senior class or of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Each candidate will write in the examination room an essay on a topic chosen by himself from a list not previously announced, in economics and political science. In addition, statements of previous studies, and any written work, must be submitted by every candidate to the Chairman of the Department of Economics not later than the time of the examination. The man who wins the scholarship must devote the majority of his time next year to economics and political studies.

Source:  Harvard Crimson, April 4, 1916.

____________________

1915-16
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
RICARDO PRIZE EXAMINATION

  1. The Single Tax.
  2. Minimum Wage for Men, in the Light of Economic Theory.
  3. Some Phase of the Theory of Value and Price.
  4. Regulation of Railroads by the States.
  5. The War and the Rate of Interest.
  6. Agricultural Credit.
  7. The Regulation of Monopolies.
  8. Free Trade in England.
  9. The Banks and the Stock Exchange.
  10. Price Maintenance.

April 5, 1916.

Source:  Harvard University Archives. Department of Economics. Correspondence & Papers 1902-1950 (UAV.349.10). Box 23. Folder: “Course outlines, 1935-37-38-42”.

Image Source: Collage of details taken from photos apf1-08488 (Viner) and  apf1-05851 (Douglas) from University of Chicago Photographic Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Categories
Chicago Economists Gender Germany Illinois Nebraska Radcliffe Wellesley Wisconsin

Michigan. Author of Progress of Labor Organization among Women, Belva Mary Herron, 1905

 

Today’s “meet an economics alumna” post features Belva Mary Herron whose only academic degree was a B.L. from the University of Michigan in 1889. Her greatest hit “Progress of Labor Organization among Women” was awarded the third Caroline Wilby Prize in 1904 “given annually to the student who has produced the best original work within any of the departments of Radcliffe College” . 

The Progress of Labor Organization Among Women, Together with Some Considerations Concerning Their Place in Industry. University of Illlinois. The University Studies Vol. I, No. 10 (May, 1905).

Herron’s only other publication I have been able to find was an article, Factory Inspection in the United States, published in the American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 12, No. 4 (January, 1907), pp. 487-99.

For the last four (or five) years of her life (she died in mid-career at age 43) she was on the faculty of Rockford College in Illinois. Between her undergraduate days and her final position at Rockford College, as best as I have been able to piece together, Belva Mary Herron wandered from the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Illinois, then through Radcliffe and Wellesley Colleges, finding time for a year of study in Germany (1896-97). 

_____________________

Review by Edith Abbott in Journal of Political Economy (1905)

Labor Organization among Women. By BELVA MARY HERRON. (Studies of the University of Illinois.) Urbana: The University Press, 1905. 8vo, pp. 79.

A careful study of the progress of labor organization among women is a most welcome contribution to our knowledge of one of the most important phases of women’s work. Miss Herron makes no attempt in this monograph to discuss trade-unionism by and large in either its theoretical or practical aspects, but confines herself closely to a statement of the facts regarding the organizations in which women are found in the largest numbers, and a discussion of the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of women as unionists.

After an investigation of the status of women in fourteen of the principal labor organizations affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, two questions should perhaps be raised: (i) Is there any evidence to show that women are to be considered a factor in the trade-union movement in this country today? (2) How do women differ from men as trade-unionists? A third question, as to the reasons why women should belong to unions, also suggests itself, but appears on second thought to be superfluous, for there is no special women’s problem here. There are the same advantages in organization for women as for men.

With regard to the first question, it is clear that woman’s rôle in trade-unionism is a very slight one. Though admitted into almost all the unions on the same footing as men, they have little or no influence on the organizations. Occasionally they serve as delegates to conventions, but the number of such delegates is very far from being in proportion to the number of women members. In short, it seems fair to say that women are not to be considered a factor in present-day unionism.

With regard to the differences between women and men as members of labor organizations, Miss Herron’s own statement should be quoted:

[Women] are not as well organized as men—a smaller percentage is in the union than is in the trade. Nearly all officials testify that it is harder  to organize women than men; a number say that when they once do understand union principles and become interested in the movement, they are  excellent workers; there is a unanimous opinion that there are always some capable working-women and active unionists whose good sense and enthusiasm are of great advantage to the organization. (P. 66.)

In summarizing the conditions unfavorable to women’s effectiveness in trade unions, Miss Herron regards as temporary the draw- backs which come from the “several trades ” — the low degree of  vitality and intelligence which result from miserable wages and bad sanitation; but she points out that there are other and permanent difficulties in the way — that women are the unskilled workers, and lack of vital interest in the trade; that many of them are young and do not take their industrial situation seriously; that they have more home interests; that most of them expect to marry, and regard their work as only a temporary employment, which results “in an unwillingness to sacrifice any present for a future good, as is often necessary in the union, or to give time and energy to build up an organization with which they will be identified but a few years.”

Those who have faith that there are large possibilities for women in industry, when the conventional ideas regarding women’s work shall have been readjusted, will not be inclined to regard these difficulties as “permanent” in any true sense. It may be suggested here that the largest field of usefulness for such organizations as the Women’s Trade Union League lies in attempting to remove these very difficulties. There is no ineradicable reason why women should not be given proper industrial training, and there is abundant testimony to show that they become very efficient workers with such training. Miss Herron points out that women are in industrial life to stay, and if that is true, we must help them to stay self-respectingly — as skilled laborers with a decent wage and an honest, workmanlike attitude toward their work.

On the whole, the monograph is one for which those who are interested in working-women should be grateful. It not only contains interesting and valuable information regarding women as unionists, but it also throws some much-needed light on the difference between women’s work and men’s work. In certain important industries it contains a short account of the relation of women to the earlier labor movement in the United States, a brief history of women’s trade unions in England, and sketches of organizations, like the Women’s Trade Union League, which are in sympathy with the movement for the organization of working-women.

EDITH ABBOTT.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.

Source: Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 13, No. 4 (September 1905), pp. 605-607.

_____________________

Personal Note (1899)

University of Nebraska.—Miss Belva Mary Herron has been appointed Instructor in Political Economy at the University of Nebraska. She was born in Pittsburg, Pa., September 23, 1866, received her early education in private schools in Mexico, Mo., and Jacksonville, Ill. And her college education in the University of Michigan, where she received the degree of Bachelor of Letters in 1889. She has subsequently pursued graduate studies at the Universities of Michigan, Chicago and Wisconsin. In 1898 Miss Herron was appointed Assistant Instructor in Political Economy.

Source: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 14 (November, 1899), p. 67.

_____________________

Belva Mary Herron, UM Class of ’89-’90, Lincoln Neb.
[with portrait, 1902]

Teacher in Girls’ Academy, Jacksonville, Ill., ’91. Studied in Germany ’96-’97. Fellow U. of C. ’93-’94. Instructor in Political Economy, University of Nebraska ’98-’02.

Source: The Michiganensian, 1902, p. 285.

_____________________

News from the Class of ‘89
[1910]

Belva M. Herron, ’89, who has occupied the chair of Political Economy and Political Science at Rockford College, Rockford, Ill., for the past four years, is expert agent for the United States Department of Labor. Address, Mexico, Mo.

Source: The Michigan Alumnus, Vol. XVII (November 1910). Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Alumni Association. P. 100.

_____________________

Necrology
University of Michigan
Graduates Literary Department

[Class of] 1889. Belva Mary Herron, B.L., d. at San Antonia [sic], Texas, March 4, 1911, aged 43. Buried at Mexico, Mo.

Source: The Michigan Alumnus, Vol. XVII (May 1911). Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Alumni Association. P. 496.

_____________________

University of Illinois, Alumni Record
*BELVA MARY HERRON

B.L., 1889, Univ. of Mich.; b. Sept. 23, 1866, Pittsburg, Pa.; d. John Fish (b. 1832, ibid.) & Rose (White) Herron (b. 1836, Montgomery Co., Mo.) Prepared in Jacksonville Acad., Ill. Honorary Fellowship, Univ. of Chicago, 1893-94; Fellowship, Univ. of Ill., 1904-05; Wilby prize for best work in Grad. Sch., Radcliffe Coll., 1904. Employment by Carnegie Inst. for writing history of labor laws in Ill., 1904. Teacher in Acad., Jacksonville, Ill., 1890; Asst. Instr., Adjust Prof.  in Dept. of Econ., Univ. of Nebr., 1898-1903; Asst. in Wellesley Coll., 1903-04; Fellow in Econ., Univ. of Ill., 1904-5; Instr., do., 1905-6. Author: Progress of Labor Organization among Women. *Deceased.

Source: James Herbert Kelley, ed. The Alumni Record of the University of Illinois(Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1913), p. 707.

_____________________

From Belva Mary Herron’s Last Will, May 22, 1909.

Note:  Net value of her estate ca. $18,400. Promissory notes secured by mortgages on real estate in Montgomery and Audrain counties, Missouri.

$1200 total explicitly designated for the First Christian Churches of Mexico Missouri, Lincoln Nebraska, Ann Arbor Michigan and the Christian Women’s Board of Missions of the Christian Church. $100 to the General Board of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

[Following sums designated for specific individuals…] “The remainder of my estate (worth at the present time between $12000 and $13000) I will and bequeath to the Board of Home Missions of the Christian (Disciples) Church to be used preferably in building a church as settlement house some where in the middle west which might bear my mother’s name, Rose Herron Chapel.”

Source: Ancestry.com database on-line. Missouri. Probate Court (Audrain County); Probate Place: Audrain, Missouri.

Image Source: The Michiganensian, 1902, p. 285.

 

Categories
Chicago Cowles Economists

Chicago. Economics Ph.D. Alumnus, Theodore O. Yntema, 1929

 

From the records of the University of Chicago’s economics department we see that Theodore O. Yntema switched his Ph.D. thesis topic to international trade from “A Study in the Theory of Demand” after eighteen months. He was of course a very distinguished Chicago Ph.D. alumnus from the 1920s.

__________________________

Distinguished Alumni Award

THEODORE O. YNTEMA
AM ’25, PHD ’29

RETIRED CHAIRMAN, FINANCE COMMITTEE
FORD MOTOR COMPANY

Theodore O. Yntema’s ties with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business span more than five decades. After receiving an AB degree from Hope College in 1921 and an MS in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1922, he came to the University of Chicago where he earned an AM in business in 1924 and a PhD in economics in 1929. His doctoral dissertation, a “Mathematical Reformulation of the General Theory of International Trade” published by the University of Chicago Press in 1932, was considered a classic in its field.

Yntema was a pioneer contributor not only to the development of the Booth School of Business, but also to the whole field of quantitative analysis in finance during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. His career furnished a strong bond between the theoretical and analytical facets of finance and its application to modern corporate management.

He served on the faculty of Chicago Booth from 1923 until 1949, when he joined the Ford Motor Credit Company. At Ford, he was vice president of finance and subsequently became chairman of the finance committee. Yntema was a Ford director and chairman of the board for two subsidiaries, Ford Motor Credit Company and America Road Insurance Company.

He was a life trustee of the University of Chicago, a member of the Council on Chicago Booth, a professional lecturer in business policy at Chicago Booth, a visiting professor at Oakland University, a trustee of the Committee on Economic Development, and a chairman of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Theodore O. Yntema Professorship at Chicago Booth was established in 1973.

Source: Chicago Booth School of Business / Distinguished Alumni Awards / Honorees / Theodore O. Yntema.

__________________________

Theodore O. Yntema (1900-1985)

A.B., Hope College, 1921; A.M., 1922. and C.P.A., 1924, University of Illinois; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1929

Theodore O. Yntema became director of research of the Cowles Commission at the time of the move to Chicago in September, 1939. [Olav Bjerkholt points out in his comment below that this is incorrect!] He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1923, and was professor of statistics in the School of Business, 1930–44, and professor of business and economic policy, 1944–49. He was economic consultant in the National Recovery Administration, 1934–35; head of economics And statistics in the Division of Industrial Materials of the Defense Commission, 1940; consulting economist and statistician for the United States Steel Corporation, 1938–40; consultant in the War Shipping Administration 1942; director of research of the Committee for Economic Development, 1942–49; consulting economist for Stein Roe & Farnham, 1945–49; consulting economist, Lord, Abbett & Co., 1946–49; consulting economist, Ford Motor Company, 1947–49; and consultant for the Economic Stabilization Agency, 1951. Since 1940 Yntema has been a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1949 Yntema joined Ford Motor Company as vice president-finance and since 1950 a director of the Company. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Statistical Association. He is author of A Mathematical Reformulation of the Theory of International Trade, 1932, and co-author of Jobs and Markets, 1946. Yntema also directed most of the research leading to Volume I of TNEC Studies, published by the United States Steel Corporation, and from 1942–49 also planned and directed most of the research leading to the Research Reports of the Committee for Economic Development. [Abstracted from A Twenty Year Research Report 1932–1952].

Source: Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics /  From the Archives / Theodore O. Yntema (1900-1985).

__________________________

Petitions for Thesis Subject and Examination by
Theodore O. Yntema, 1926-27

March 15, 1926

Mr. T. O. Yntema
University of Chicago
Faculty Exchange

My dear Mr. Yntema:

At the last Departmental meeting it seemed to the group that the suggested topic “A Study in the Theory of Demand” is satisfactory as a thesis subject.

The fields that you suggested for the examination seemed entirely satisfactory:

  1. Theory
  2. Accounting and Statistics
  3. The Market
  4. Finance

Yours very sincerely,

LCM:MLH

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The University of Chicago
The School of Commerce and Administration

August 20, 1927.

The Faculty of the Department of Economics:

I hereby petition for a change of my fourth field from “The Market” to “International Economic Policies”. This seems desirable in view of the change in my thesis topic from “A Study in the Theory of Demand” to “A Mathematical Reformulation of the General Theory of International Trade”. My revised list of fields would then be:

  1. Economic Theory
  2. Finance
  3. Statistics and Accounting
  4. International Economic Policies

[signed]
Theodore O. Yntema

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

[To:] Mr. T. O. Yntema

[From:] L. C. Marshall

Nov. 21, [19]27

            I am instructed to report to you that the field “International Economic Policies” meets with approval as far as the matter of general principle is concerned.

The next appropriate step is for you to prepare a detailed statement suggesting as precisely as you can what territory you intend to cover and what you contemplate preparing for the examination.

LCM: GS

Source: University of Chicago Archives. Department of Economics Records. Box 38, Folder 1.

Image Source:  Hope College. Digital Collections. History of Science at Hope College. 1921; Theodore Otte Yntema; Consulting Economist for Stein, Roe, and Farnham; Ford Motor Car Company; Lord Abbott Company.

 

Categories
Berkeley Columbia Economist Market Economists Harvard M.I.T. Yale

Columbia. Instructors for Economics in Columbia College. Considering Okun et al., 1951

 

This following 1951 memo by the head of the economics department at Columbia, Jamew W. Angell, to his colleagues about the relatively mundane matter of identifying potential candidates for an instructor vacancy in the undergraduate economics program in Columbia College, caught my attention with a paragraph describing the up-and-coming graduate student Arthur Okun. Five current instructors were identified by name together with three ranked potential candidates. I figured this would be as good a time as any, to see what sort of career information I’d be able to gather on the other seven names that I did not recognize. 

I was least successful with Mr. George F. Dimmler whose Google traces would indicate that he had gone on to teach briefly at Wharton and then worked as an economist at  the Commercial Investment Trust (CIT) Financial Corporation. But for the other six economists (as well as Okun) it was relatively easy to find obituaries!

While Arthur Okun was clearly the leading candidate considered for the position, the instructorship instead went to the Fellner student from Berkeley, Jacob Weissman. As of this post I do not know whether this means that Okun was not offered the job, or had been offered the instructorship but had a better opportunity.

___________________

MEMO REGARDING POTENTIAL INSTRUCTORS FOR UNDERGRADUATE ECONOMICS AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE

CONFIDENTIAL

May 8, 1951

To Professors Bergson, Bonbright, A. F. Burns, A. R. Burns, Clark, Dorfman, Goodrich, Haig, Hart, Mills, Nurkse, Shoup, Stigler, Wolman

From James W. Angell

Because of the prospective shrinkage of the enrollment and the greater exercise of professional option by students of Columbia College, it will probably be necessary to reduce the number of appointments as Instructor of Economics in College from the present five to two for next year. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the College is adopting a general policy of not renewing appointments to instructor ships beyond a total term of five years. None of the present instructors will be dismissed, but all of them are being encouraged and helped to find new positions. Two of them, [George F.] Dimmler and [Daniel M.] Holland,  [see below]  have already made other arrangements for next year; and the other three, [Lawrence] Abbott [from Prabook], [Frank W.] Schiff [see below] and [Nian-Tzu] Wang [see below, have definite possibilities for other employment. It is improbable that we will lose all five of these men, but there is a definite possibility that one new instructor will be needed, and a rather remote possibility that we will need two.

Since definite action may not be required until the summer, when most of us will be away, I am now calling the situation to your attention. Horace Taylor, as Chairman of the Departmental Committee in the College, has proposed for consideration three men whom he regards as the most promising candidates known to him for appointment as Instructor, should a vacancy develop. I give below summaries of the records of these men, based largely or wholly on material which Taylor provided (entirely so in the case of Weissman). They are listed in Taylor’s order.

OKUN, Arthur. [Brookings Memorial] A. B. From Columbia College, 1949, with honors and special distinction in Economics; first in his class of over five hundred in the College; Green Memorial Prize; Phi Beta Kappa. Entered our Graduate Department in 1949, University Scholar, 1949-50, and University Fellow, 1950-51. Has A’s in all courses he took in the Graduate School. Passed the Qualifying Examination with A on the Essay, two A’s and 3 B’s on the Specific questions. Has passed language examinations in German and in Mathematics; certified in Statistics and in General Economic History. Will take the orals this spring, offering Economic Theory, Monetary Economics, Public Utility and Public Finance. Taylor writes: “He is regarded by everyone in the College staff as one of the most gifted students we ever have had, and I believe he is well known to members of the graduate faculty. My recollection is that he made the highest score ever made on the graduate record examination. Some of his teachers in graduate school have spoken of him as the ablest of the current group of students there. He has no teaching experience, but it is going to conduct some discussion sections of Robert Carey’s course in elementary economics next Summer Session. Okun was No. 1 man in his class of over 500 in Columbia College.”

WEISSMAN, Jacob. [see below] Taylor writes: “A more mature man than Okun. Has had business and industrial experience, in the sense that he was General Manager of a steel company in which his family is interested. He resigned this $20,000 job to take up graduate study of economics at the University of California. Messrs. Davisson, Fellner, and Gordon of of U. of C. have written letters recommending him in the highest terms. One or two of them even said that Weissman is the ablest graduate student of economics at the U. of C. in some years. He is now at Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be in touch with Mr. Fellner, who is directing Weissman’s dissertation. I had Weissman to lunch when he passed through New York last summer, and was greatly impressed with his good mind, excellent training, and modesty. He is eager for a job here.”

AHEARN, Daniel. [see below]  A.B. from Columbia College, 1949; Phi Beta Kappa; graduate fellowship from Columbia College for 1949-50. Entered our Graduate Department in 1949; Kazanjian Scholar, 1950-51; Master’s thesis on the business cycle fluctuation in 1932-34, now in process with Professor Hart. Passed Qualifying Examination in 1950, with a B average. Seven A’s and one B in graduate courses. Has passed the German examination and has certified in Statistics and American Economic History. Will take orals this spring, offering Economic Theory, Monetary Economics, Business Cycles and Industrial Organization. Taylor writes: “Now in graduate school, and probably well-known to most staff members. He was a classmate of Okun, and ranked third in the class in which Okun was first. A man of unusual ability, excellent personal qualities, is highly regarded by the College staff.”

There are doubtless also other men whom you would like to suggest for consideration. I shall greatly appreciate receiving such suggestions promptly, together with as much information about them as you can provide; and also your own judgment and comparative rating of the men discussed above.

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Robert M. Haig Papers, Box 107, Folder: Haig Correspondence A, 1949-1952”.

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Jacob Weissman’s initial appointment, 1951-52.

He replaced Daniel M. Holland. Appointed July 1, 1951 for one year, annual salary $3600.

Source:  Columbia University Libraries Manuscript Collections. Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection, Box 4, Budget, 1945/1946-1954/1955, Folder “Budget 1951-52”.

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Weissman appointment extended to a fifth year

Jacob Weissman will have served four years as instructor, but we seek his reappointment for a fifth year at his present salary [$3,800], and that permission for this be sought from the President of the University under section 60 of the Statutes. The ground for this request are that Weissman expects to submit his dissertation on “The Law of Oligopoly: A Study of the Relationship between Legal and Economic Theory” at the University of California in the Spring of 1955, when we expect to be in a better position to assess his worth. Also, Weissman has done and is doing much for the College, and it seems fair to him to let him get his degree before seeking a position elsewhere, if we have eventually to let him go.”

Source: Report of College Committee on Economics to the Executive Officer, Department of Economics (November 15, 1954) by Harold Barger, Chairman of the College Committee, Department of Economics”

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Jacob I. Weissman
Obituary
(July 13, 2006)

Jacob I. Weissman, a lawyer, inveterate storyteller and Phi Beta Kappa scholar who chaired the economics department at Hofstra University before retiring to Martha’s Vineyard, died peacefully July 11 at Henrietta Brewer House surrounded by family and friends. He was 92.

Professor Weissman would often tell friends that he disagreed with the general description of economics as a dismal science and that had coined his own term: the trivial science.

He explained: “Economists don’t deal sufficiently with aspirations, and ambitions of people or other variables.”

According to his wife, Nikki Langer Weissman, this quote summarized his world view. “Despite his considerable academic achievements,” she said, “Jacob was a man who never lost sight of the fact that human beings come before statistics and that human behavior defies predictive models.” Professor Weissman was born and raised in Detroit. In 1935, he graduated from the University of Michigan Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics.

After graduation, he enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School, completing his J.D. degree and graduating first in class and was also editor of the Michigan Law Review. Following law school, he spent a year traveling to Japan, China, southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Prior to graduation from law school, he had been invited to work as clerk to the chief justice of the supreme court of Michigan. However, due to his father’s illness, he felt obliged to decline, as he was needed to run the family business, where he remained as president for 12 years.

After this detour, Professor Weissman decided to return to the world he loved – academia. In 1947, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in economics. While completing his dissertation, he taught at Columbia University in New York until 1956, when he received his doctorate in economics. He was hired by the University of Chicago as a research associate in law and economics at the law school and later associate professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

He often attributed his love of academics to his teaching experience at Columbia “because the university used many of its faculty to teach not only in their own disciplines, but in a wonderful general education program.”

“I became very enriched by that teaching and my vision of an ideal academic life was fulfilled,” he once told a reporter. “An element of chance was involved in this path I chose, but it suited me well.”

In 1963, he was invited to join the faculty at Hofstra University in New York as professor of economics and chairman of the economics department. He also served as speaker of faculty, a post he held for two years. In 1982, he was appointed interim dean of Hofstra University’s School of Business.

At Hofstra, he met and married Shirley (Nikki) Langer, who was associate professor of psychology. They remained at Hofstra University until his retirement in 1983.

In 1969, impressed by the vitality and community spirit on the Vineyard, they became homeowners in Chilmark.Professor Weissman gave generously of his time and talents on the Vineyard.

He served on the board of directors of the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and as chairman of its ethics committee. He was a board member and treasurer of Howes House (West Tisbury Council on Aging). He and his wife gave lessons at the various senior centers on creativity, aging and other topics.

His publications on law and economics were included in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy and The University of Chicago’s Journal of Business.

In addition to his wife, Nikki Langer Weissman of Chilmark; his son, Stephen Weissman of London; his sister, Helen Rosenman of San Francisco; his stepson, Kenneth Langer of Takoma Park, Md.; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Langer of Washington, D.C.; six grandchildren, Max Weissman and Maisie Weissman, Ben Langer Chused, Sam Langer, Nora Langer and Amelia Langer; and two great-grandchildren, Kate and Toby Weissman.

Source: Vineyard Gazette, July 13, 2006.

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Daniel S. Ahearn
Obituary
(April 6, 2016)

AHEARN, Daniel S., Ph.D. 90, of Winchester, March 30, 2016. Beloved husband of Louise (Freeman) Ahearn. Loving father of Barbara Ahearn of Arlington and the late Kathleen and JoAnne Ahearn. Born in New York City, Daniel was the son of the late Daniel and Margaret (Walter) Ahearn. A World War II veteran, he served in the 399th Infantry 100th Division from 1943 to 1946 in France and Germany. He received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1949 and his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1961. His book “Federal Reserve Policy Reappraised 1951-1959” was based on his Ph.D. thesis. Daniel spent his roughly 65-year working life in positions involving economics, investments and monetary and fiscal policy. From 1961 to 1995, he was at Wellington Management Company with positions including senior vice president, partner and chairman of the investment policy group. In 1963 he left Wellington to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Debt Management until 1965. He also advised the Treasury Dept. for about 25 years as a member of the Government and Federal Agencies Securities Committee of the Public Securities Assoc. After leaving Wellington, Daniel formed Capital Markets Strategies where he continued advisory work. In Winchester, where he was a resident for 47 years, Daniel was an Investment Trustee of Winchester Hospital from 1974-2012. He is widely remembered for his reports on investments to the annual meeting of the Winchester Hospital board.

Source: Boston Globe obituary from Legacy.com.

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Frank W. Schiff
Obituary
(August 28, 2006)

Frank W. Schiff, 85, who served as vice president and chief economist of the Committee for Economic Development from 1969 to 1986, died Aug. 17 at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital of complications from a back injury.

At the Committee for Economic Development, an independent organization of business executives and university administrators, Mr. Schiff coordinated statements and monographs on a wide range of national and international economic policy issues. His efforts involved tax reform, budget deficits, the federal budget process, energy independence, job training, public-private partnerships and the international monetary system.

He played a key role in the creation of local Private Industry Councils under the federal Job Training Partnership Act. He had a special interest in flexible work arrangements, such as greater use of “flexiplace” and work sharing as an alternative to layoffs or women leaving the workforce.

He said in 1983 that in situations where flexiplace — working at home or other places other than the office — had been tried, productivity improved in most cases 10 to 20 percent and sometimes substantially more.

Mr. Schiff was born in Greisswald, Germany, and fled the Nazis in 1936. He was 15 when he and his family arrived in New York, where he finished high school in New Rochelle and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University. He also did graduate work in economics at Columbia.

From 1943 to 1945, he served in the Army in the 35th Infantry Division in France. After the war, he was an economics instructor at Columbia.

Beginning in 1951, Mr. Schiff held several positions with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Among them was head of the Latin American unit and assistant vice president of research.

He went to Vietnam in the early 1960s to advise the government on creation of a central bank.

As senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers from 1964 to 1968, Mr. Schiff had responsibility for international finance, coordination of international economic policies and domestic monetary policy. He regularly represented the council at international monetary policy meetings in Paris.

He served as deputy undersecretary of the Treasury for monetary affairs from 1968 to 1969 and was involved in domestic economic policy and international monetary policy formulation and negotiations, debt management and relations with the Federal Reserve.

Mr. Schiff lived in Washington from 1964 to 1983, when he moved to Alexandria. He retired in 1986.

He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Conference of Business Economists and served as president and chairman of the National Economists Club.

In 1990, Mr. Schiff returned to his childhood home in Germany on a trip with Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minn.). Vivid memories flooded his mind as he stood in the 1915 art deco apartment building where he grew up in what became a West Berlin residential area. “It was very pleasant here before the Hitler period,” he said.

Survivors include his wife, Erika Deussen Schiff, whom he married in 1974, of Alexandria; and a brother.

Source: Washington Post.August 28, 2006.

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Daniel M. Holland
Obituary
(January 8, 1992)

Daniel M. Holland, professor emeritus of finance at the Sloan School of Management and a widely known expert on taxation and public finance, died December 15 at Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, while under treatment for a heart condition. Professor Holland, a Lexington resident, was 71.

A memorial service is being planned for some time in February at the MIT Chapel.

Professor Holland was an MIT faculty member from 1958 until his retirement in 1986, when he became an emeritus professor and senior lecturer. He also served as an assistant to the provost from 1986 to 1990.

He was a consultant over the years to government agencies, including the US Treasury, foreign governments and private companies.

He was editor of the National Tax Journal for more than 20 years, served as president of the National Tax Association in 1988-89, and was the author of several books on taxation and numerous articles both in professional journals and other publications. His books included Dividends Under the Income Tax and Private Pension Funds: Projected Growth, for which he received the Elizur Wright Award of the American Risk and Insurance Association.

Professor Abraham J. Siegel, former dean of the Sloan School, said, “Dan was a great colleague and friend, broadly gauged in his knowledge and interests. Those of us who have known him for over 30 years, as well as his younger colleagues, will miss him enormously.”

Professor Holland, who was born in New York City, received AB and PhD degrees from Columbia University, in 1941 and 1951, respectively.

He served three years in the Navy during World War II, mostly aboard a destroyer escort in the Pacific theater.

He was a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research before becoming an associate professor of economics at New York University in 1957, the year before he came to MIT, also as an associate professor. He was promoted to full professor at MIT in 1962.

His professional groups included the American Economic Association, American Finance Association, Royal Economic Society, International Institute of Public Finance and the International Fiscal Association.

He leaves his wife, Jeanne A. (Ormont) Holland; two children, Andy of New York City, a scenic artist, and Laura Roeper of Amherst, Mass., a writer; two grandchildren and four nephews.

Source:  MIT News, January 8, 1992.

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Nian-Tzu Wang
Obituary
The New York Times (Aug. 29 to Aug. 30, 2004)

WANG-Nian-Tzu, N.T., of Larchmont, NY, died of cancer, on August 26, 2004. Loving husband of Mabel U, devoted father of June, Kay (Leighton Chen), Cynthia (Daniel Sedlis), Geraldine, and Newton, and proud grandfather of Christine, Stephanie and Lucy. In his autobiography, “My Nine Lives”, NT wrote of his lives as number one son, traditional scholar, foreign student, public servant, instructor, international servant, advisor, academician, and immigrant. NT was born in Shanghai on July 25, 1917. Initially trained to be a Confucian scholar, he received a classical education at home, where he was tutored in Chinese poetry, painting, the Classics and other literati skills. Math, science, and languages were introduced later by his father, Pai Yuan (PY) Wang, a sophisticated banker when he decided to school his four sons in Western ways when they were teenagers. In 1937, NT went abroad to study at the London School of Economics and Germany. He transferred to Columbia where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in economics in 1941, and went on to receive an M.A. and PhD in economics from Harvard. NT will be remembered throughout the international community for his dedicated efforts in advising businesses and governments around the world on ecomonic development. He made many contributions to his homeland of China, the U.S., his home since 1939, and to countless countries which he helped through his work at the U.N. Economic and Social Council. After retiring from a 28 year career at the United Nations, as the Director of the Centre on Transnational Corporations, he returned to Columbia Univ. to teach at the School of Business and the School of International and Public Affairs. He thoroughly enjoyed his time with his students, organizing seminars, creating training programs for Chinese academic and business leaders, and working tirelessly as the Director of the China-International Business Project. In his final days, he was polishing his keynote speech as part of Columbia University’s 250th anniversary celebration. He was an honorary professor of ten universities, a fellow of the International Academy of Management, and a recipient of many awards, including the New York Governor’s Award for Outstanding Asian American. In addition to his many professional achievements, his passions included dancing with his life partner of 62 years, Mabel, and playing tennis. NT exhausted his daughter Kay playing two and a half hours of tennis after celebrating his 87th birthday just one month ago. Throughout his life, he took time to compose classical Chinese poems, which his family will compile as the tenth chapter in his life, ‘The Poet’. A memorial service will be announced later. Contributions may be made to Community Funds Inc. for the N.T. and Mabel Wang Charitable Fund, which will continue the mission of the China-International Business Project he established at Columbia University, c/o Community Funds Inc., 2 Park Avenue, NY, NY 10016.

Source: Legacy.com obituaries.

Image Source: Arthur Okun. Yale Memorial Webpage.

Categories
Berkeley Chicago Dartmouth Economists

Berkeley and Dartmouth. Frank Knight’s economist brothers Melvin M. Knight and Bruce Winton Knight

 

Pairs of siblings becoming professors of economics are infrequent but hardly rare. A trio of siblings becoming professors of economics becomes easier to imagine when one considers families with nine children as was the case for Frank H. Knight and his brothers Melvin Moses Knight and Bruce Winton Knight. This post provides images and official university obituaries  for Melvin and Bruce. 

Seeing “salty individualist” in the first line of an obituary tells us something about Melvin, perhaps that he was not an easy-going, cheery colleague?  

The previous post unearthed a ballad (The Ballad of Right Price) from the early 1920’s written by Bruce Knight who was a graduate-student quizmaster for University of Michigan professor Fred M. Taylor at the time.

The only photo I could find of the eldest of the three, Melvin, is cropped from the image of his passport application of June 1917. At the  online archive of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine one can find a few different pictures of the youngest, Bruce.

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Melvin Moses Knight, Economics: Berkeley
1887-1981
Professor Emeritus

The University of California has numbered many salty individualists among its faculty. M.M. (Melvin Moses) Knight must figure high among them. Born April 29, 1887 on a farm near Bloomington, Illinois, he was one of nine children. Three were to be distinguished economists, M.M. at Berkeley, Frank at the University of Chicago, and Bruce at Dartmouth. Life on the farm was not always easy. At age 13, M.M. found himself responsible for running the farm. A self-taught man, he never attended high school. For a time he worked as a locksmith and bicycle mechanic. He later showed skills as plumber and musician. At age 23 he managed to qualify for entrance into Milligan College, Tennessee. After two years, he transferred to the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and economics. He took an A.B. at Texas Christian University in English in 1913, followed the next year by an M.A. in history. He studied for a while at the University of Chicago and finally earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Clark University in sociology, with a thesis, Taboo and Genetics. His studies continued at other institutions, including the New School for Social Research and the University of Paris in such fields as geology, geography, genetics, mathematics, and theology. Later his wide interdisciplinary interests showed up in his teaching and writing.

He was no stranger to war. During World War I he served as a volunteer ambulance driver with the French army and later with the intelligence section of the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force. In 1919 he served as a volunteer with the Romanian Field Hospital, Regina Maria, in Transylvania and Hungary. He was discharged as a captain and decorated with the Romanian Cross of Merit. During World War II, by then too old for active duty, he served as Assistant Chief, Division of Economic Studies, Department of State.

M.M.’s academic career began in 1920 at Hunter College, followed by brief periods at the Universities of Utah and California. From 1923 to 1926 he was in the Department of History at Columbia University. In 1926 an Amherst Memorial Fellowship took him to Europe and North Africa to examine the French colonial system. In 1928 he joined the Department of Economics of the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1954.

In teaching, writing, and dealings with colleagues, M.M. displayed the keenly interdisciplinary character of his studies and a probing curiosity. His first publication was a Dictionnaire Pratique d’Aeronautique, prepared for the U.S. Air Service in 1918. After that came a number of articles on the contemporary economy and the political problems of eastern Europe, economic history, and colonial questions. His “Water and the Course of Empire in French North Africa” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1925) is a masterly exposition of the millennial relation between physical changes in man’s environment and the structure of economic organization. By the mid-1920s he entered upon a spate of publication: Economic History of Europe to the End of the Middle Ages (1926), later translated into French; co-authorship of Economic History of Europe to Modern Times(1928); The Americans in Santo Domingo(1928), a condensation of a much larger manuscript, published as well in a number of Spanish editions; an English translation of Sée’s Economic Interpretation of History (1929); Introduction to Modern Economic History (1940); and numerous articles in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

M.M. Knight’s concerns in economics are best summarized in the tribute to him written by Giulio Pontecorvo and Charles F. Stewart in 1979 (Exploration in Economic History, 16:243-245):

The theoretical apparatus of contemporary economics is focused on general equilibrium analysis and the solution of welfare problems within that static framework. In the simplest sense, Knight departs from today’s emphasis and this line of inquiry by his deep fundamental concern with the problem of the nature of economic scarcity and society’s response to scarcity through time rather than with the determinants of real income and the social implications of alternative income distributions.

He transcends Veblen and especially Galbraith and Rostow by his concern with the evolution and the full extent of economic structures. While Veblen was concerned with the industrial economy and its linkages to other elements, e.g., finance, etc., Knight’s view is both more holistic and more focused on the evolutionary and disequilibrium properties of economic systems.

Unlike the American institutional position, as it is typically presented, Knight adds a strong sense of geography, of place, and the ecology of place. In this particular way, he reveals his links both with his rural origins and with the traditions of French economic history…

Each society is constrained by its own geographic and resource endowments. Each therefore responds to the problem of scarcity in its own way and creates its own institutions or transforms those it borrows. Regardless of the form of the response, the process of expansion works over time to use up the opportunity… Once an opportunity is used up, it requires both technological development and a reordering of social institutions to create a new set of human opportunities and this is a formidable social task of the true long run… unlike the essentially optimistic cast of Marxian inevitability, Knight has a strong sense that systems run down and because they are located in space as well as in time, systems that have exhausted themselves do not necessarily get transformed and revived but tend to be replaced, as were Egypt and Rome and North Africa.

While in Paris, Knight married Eleanor Gehmann in what proved to be a long, happy companionship in his years of active service and after his retirement in 1954. She died in February, he on June 12, 1981.

W.W. Borah M.M. Davisson C.A. Mosk

 

Source: Melvin Moses Knight, 1887-1981. Economics: Berkeley. University of California (System) Academic Senate. 1988, University of California: In Memoriam, pp. 76-78.

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Obituary, Bruce Winton Knight

Bruce Winton Knight, for 36 years a member of the Dartmouth economics faculty, died on May 28 at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover after a long illness. He would have been 88 on June 27.

Knight, who retired in 1960, was a vigorous opponent of what he called “pseudo-liberalism” and “state paternalism” in government. He was introduced to the conservative concepts he taught in courses on economic principles and the economics of international peace by his elder brother, the late Frank Knight, widely honored as the founder of the “Chicago school of economics.”

A native of Colfax County, Ill., Knight attended Texas Christian University and earned a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1920 and an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1923.

He taught economics at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, where he met his wife, the former Myrtle Eickelberg. He joined the Dartmouth faculty as an instructor in economics in 1924 and became a professor in 1934. He was also a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and had served for a number of years on the Dartmouth College Athletic Council.

Knight wrote three books on economics and a book on peace, entitled How to Run a War, published by Alfred Knopf in 1936. Despite his authorship of these four books and a solid record of writing for scholarly journals, he opposed the academic doctrine of “publish or perish.” He felt that faculty members should only write when they wished, not simply to gain recognition and status. He was cited by the Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge, Pa., for an article he wrote in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazinein December 1949 entitled “Our Greatest Issue,” which he identified as “pseudo-liberalism.”

During World War I, he served with the U.S. Army infantry for two-and-a-half years, including more than a year in the Philippines.

Knight had also been an avid baseball fan ever since his days as a pitcher in college, and he rarely missed a Dartmouth varsity baseball game.

He is survived by his wife, a son, a daughter, three brothers,aand two sisters.

 

Source:  Dartmouth Alumni Magazine June 1980, p. 93.

Image Sources:

Die Drei von der Tankstelle, classic German film from 1930.

Melvin Moses Knight from National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington D.C.; Roll #: 366; Volume #: Roll 0366 – Certificates: 54301-54700, 31 May 1917-06 Jun 1917.

Bruce Winton Knight from Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1954, p. 18.

Categories
Chicago Economists Kansas Minnesota

Chicago. Economics PhD alumnus. Jens Peter Jensen, 1926

 

Born in Denmark and educated at Dakota Wesleyan University, University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago, Jens Peter Jensen is now officially added to our Meet-an-Economics-Ph.D. series with the profile below written for the 1937 yearbook at the University of Kansas.

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From the List of Economics Ph.D. dissertations of the University of Chicago
(1894-1926)

1926. Jensen, Jens Peter.

Thesis Title: The general property tax.

A.B. Dakota Wesleyan University, 1913; A.M. University of Minnesota, 1917.

1883, April 8. Born in Trustrup, Denmark.
1900. Emigrated to U.S.
1917-18. Fellow in Political Economy, University of Chicago.
1918-19. Taught at Beloit College.
1919. Instructor, University of Chicago.
1919-21. Assistant Professor of Economics and Commerce. University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
1921-. Associate Professor of Economics and Commerce. University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
1924. Problems of Public Finance. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
1930-31 (Visiting) Associate professor of economics, University of Chicago.
1931. Professor of Economics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
1937. Government Finance. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
1938. Professor of Economics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
1942, August 26. Died in Brush, Colorado.

Obituary:  In Memoriam: Jens P. Jensen, 1883-1942 by John Ise in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Apr., 1943), pp. 391-392.

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Profile of Kansas Economics Professor Jens Peter Jensen (1937)

… Jens Peter Jensen, native of Denmark, gives advice to the state of Kansas on problems of taxation, public revenues, and text collections. In February, 1935, he was a member of the commission which surveyed the state government of Oklahoma and its system of public finance. Frank Marland, then Sooner governor-elect, proposed the plan that caused this commission to be organized.

Since 1925, Mr. Jensen has written the annual report of progress in the field of land and public taxation and corporation and bank taxation for the American Yearbook.

For the Tax Research Foundation (under the New York Tax Commission), he prepares the Kansas charts to indicate the status of tax law and legislation in this state.

Since 1920, Mr. Jensen has been a member of the National Tax Association, has been Kansas’ delegate to its annual conventions, and has served three years on the association’s executive committee. Too, he was for a time an associate editor of the association’s official Bulletin.

Under the auspices of the Kansas State Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Jensen, with Harold Howe, professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State College, Manhattan, prepared “Tax Studies in 13 Lessons.” Distributed by the sponsors, these lessons were used in study clubs and civic organizations of the state for adult education in public finance.

Among the books which Mr. Jensen has written are A Text in Public Finance, Property Taxation in the United States, The Tax System in Colorado, and Government Finance. He has contributed articles to the Annals of the American Association of Social and Political Economy, Law and Contemporary Events (published by Duke University), American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that Mr. Jensen has done all of this work in 31 years. Born of a Swedish father and a Danish mother on April 8, 1883, twenty-one-year-old Jens Jensen left Denmark in 1905. Son of a poor family, he had to terminate his common school education in the eighth grade to work on the farm and then to learn to creamery trade.

Landing in the United States with only his tradesmen’s knowledge, he journeyed to Minnesota, got a job. But by 1907 he left his job, went to Mitchell, South Dakota, where he enrolled in the Academy and College of Dakota Wesleyan University, graduated with an A. B. degree in 1913. His alma mater honored him within honorary doctor of laws degree only last spring. In 1917, he received his A. M. degree from the University of Minnesota; his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1926.

Since 1919, Mr. Jensen has been associated with the University of Kansas. He has taught in two summer sessions at the University of West Virginia. In 1930-31, he was given leave of absence to do a year’s work on research and government finance of counties. He did this work at the University of Chicago.

Married, Mr. Jensen has one daughter. His hobby is traveling, and he has been in three-fourths of the states of the United States and in all but two of the Canadian provinces. He returned for his first visit to Denmark in 1926, visiting also Scotland, England, Norway and Sweden.

Here is a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church, the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, and the University club. The most tedious three months in his life, he says, were spent in the Student Army Training Corps at the University of Minnesota in 1918. Previous to his enlistment he was statistician and economist for the food administration under the then Secretary of Commerce, Hoover.

 

Source of text and image: University of Kansas, Jayhawker (yearbook). Christmas number, 1937, p. 100.

 

Categories
Bryn Mawr Economists Gender Harvard Stanford Tufts

Radcliffe/Harvard. Economics Ph.D. Alumna. Maxine Yaple Sweezy, 1940.

 

In our continuing series of Get-to-Know-an-Economics-Ph.D., we meet a Radcliffe Ph.D. from 1940, Maxine Yaple Sweezy. Her dissertation was on the Nazi economy and incidentally she was the first wife of the American Marxian economist, Paul Sweezy. This post adds a few details about her life (she was a debater at Stanford) and career (minimum wage work). I take particular pride in finding youthful pictures of this economist of yore.

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Greatest Hit

In his historical retrospective of the concept of “privatization”,  Germà Bel identifies Maxine Yaple Sweezy’s published Radcliffe dissertation, The Structure of the Nazi Economy (1941), as having introduced “reprivatization” into the vocabulary of economic policy.

Source: Bel, Germà. The Coining of “Privatization” and Germany’s National Socialist Party. Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 2006), p 189.

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Encyclopedia entry

Pack, Spencer J. “Maxine Bernard Yaple Sweezy Woolston” in A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists, Robert W. Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand and Evelyn L. Forget (eds.). Cheltenham UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2000. pp. 472-475

Pack lists the following schools where Maxine Y. Woolston taught: Sarah Lawrence, Tufts, Vassar, Simmons, Haverford, Swarthmore, Wellesley, University of Pennsylvania, University of New Haven, with Bryn Mawr as the longest position.

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Basic life data

Born. 16 September 1912 [in Missouri].

Source: Social Security Claims Index, 1936-2007.

First marriage: Paul M. Sweezy and Maxine Yaple were married 21 March 1936 in Manhattan, New York.

Source: New York City Department of Records/Municipal Archives. Index to New York City Marriages, 1866-1937.

Second marriage:  to William Jenks Woolston, lawyer (b. 30 Jan. 1908, d. 25 Dec. 1964) [date of marriage: 11 Mar 1944]

Source: Family Tree “Morris, Wells and collateral lines” at ancestry.com, though date of marriage is unsourced there and could not be verified.

Death. 29 April 2004. Last residence: New Haven, Ct.

Source: Social Security Claims Index, 1936-2007.

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American Economic Association Membership Listing, 1957

Woolston, Maxine Yaple, (Mrs. W. J.), R. 2 Harts Lane, Conshohocken, Pa. (1953) Bryn Mawr Col., lecturer, teach.; b. 1912; A.B., 1934, M.A., 1935, Stanford; Ph.D., 1939, Radcliffe Col. Fields 14bd, 12ab, 2. Doc. Dis. Nazi economic policies. Pub. Economic program for American economy (Vanguard Press, 1938); Structure of Nazi economy (Harvard Univ. Press, 1941); La Economia Nacional Socialista (translation) (Stackpole, 1954). Res. Wages at the turning points. Dir. Amer. Men of Sci. III.

Source:  The American Economic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, Handbook of the American Economic Association (Jul., 1957), p. 329

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Women’s Debate Team at Stanford

From the 1932 Stanford yearbook page on the Women’s debate team: sometime around the end of February, 1932 Maxine Yaple and Lucile Smith debated with a team from the College of the Pacific the resolution “The United States should enact legislation provided socialized medical service”.

In 1933 a debating section of (male) athletes was assembled and in their second debate (“Resolved, That a separate college for women should be stablished at Stanford”) with Helen Ray and Maxine Yaple constituting the Women’s Team was called a draw.

For the source of the pictures used for this post, see the Image Source below.

Research Tip:  The Stanford Daily student newspaper archive.  Search on her last name “Yaple“.

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“Maiden” publication in the AER

Yaple, Maxine. The Burden of Direct Taxes as Paid by Income Classes. American Economic Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec., 1936), pp. 691-710.

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Rebecca A. Greene Fellowship at Radcliffe

Maxine Yaple Sweezy, A.B. (Stanford Univ.) 1933, A.M. (ibid.) 1934. Subject, Economics.

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1936-37, p. 17.

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Political Book:  An Economic Program for American Democracy

Contributors: Richard V. Gilbert; George H. Hildebrand Jr. ; Arthur W. Stuart; Maxine Yaple Sweezy ; Paul M. Sweezy; Lorie Tarshis and John D. Wilson. New York: Vanguard Press, 2nd printing, 1938

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Teaching appointment at Tufts

Mrs. Paul Sweezy (Maxine Yaple) has been appointed instructor in the department of economics at Tufts College for the year 1938-1939.

Source: Notes. American Economic Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (June, 1938), p. 438.

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Economics at Radcliffe, 1939
(from the yearbook)

“Don’t you think he’s a little radical?”, a girl asked her tutor about one of his colleagues in the Ec. Department. The tutor roared with laughter and gave her The Coming Struggle for Power [by John Strachey, London, 1932] to read.

Ec. Professors like to refer to their colleagues and then tear into their arguments. They should have a contest sometime to see whose masterpiece could withstand concentrated criticism. We enjoyed Mason’s reference to his “friend”. We’ve entered with glee on Chamberlin’s campaign to exterminate the word “imperfect” competition and we almost had hysterics over William’s blasting of all economists from Keynes to Hajek [sic].

The life of the Ec. Professors is constantly being interrupted by the press. The Crimson demanded a profound statement on the effect of import duties on German goods before they would let Galbraith go back to sleep in the middle of the night. Since a group collaborated on a book called An Economic Program for American Democracy, “seven men and a blonde” is the favorite characterization of the Ec. Department by the press. The blonde is Mrs. Paul Sweezy.

Source: Radcliffe College. Upon a Typical Year… Thirty and Nine. Cambridge, MA (1939).

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First article carved from dissertation research

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. Distribution of Wealth and Income under the Nazis. Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Nov., 1939), pp. 178-184.

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Radcliffe A.M. conferred in June, 1939.

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1938-39, p. 20.

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Ph.D. conferred in February, 1940

Maxine Yaple Sweezy, A.M.

Subject, Economics. Special Field, Industrial Organization and Control. Dissertation, “Nazi Economic Policies.”

 

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1939-40, p. 22.

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Second article carved from dissertation research

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. German Corporate Profits: 1926-1938. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 54, No. 3 (May, 1940), pp. 384-398.

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Published Dissertation

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. The Structure of the Nazi Economy. Harvard studies in monopoly and competition, no. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941.

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Vassar and then OPA

Maxine Y. Sweezy, assistant professor of economics at Vassar College, is on leave for the year 1942-43 to serve as senior economist for the Office of Price Administration in Washington.

Source: Notes. The American Economic Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1942), p. 964.

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Bryn Mawr and Philadelphia City Planning Commission

“The Social Economy Department also has one new member, Miss Maxine Woolston Ph.D. Radcliffe and member of the City Planning Commission, Philadelphia, has entered the department as Lecturer.”

Source: The College News, Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, PA., Wednesday, October 9, 1946, p. 2.

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Return [?] to Bryn Mawr

Maxine Y. Woolston has been appointed lecturer in political economy at Bryn Mawr College for the current year.

Source: Notes. The American Economic Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March, 1950), p. 266.

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Publications in 1950

Economic Base Study of Philadelphia, Philadelphia City Planning Commission, 1950.

World Economic Development and Peace, American Association of University Women. Washington, D.C.: 1950. [30 pages]

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Course at Haverford

Maxine Woolston to Give Course “Urban Planning”

Sociology 38, a study of the modern urban community, will be taught this semester by Dr. Maxine (William Jenks) Woolston. Mrs. Woolston comes to Haverford from Bryn Mawr College with experience both as an educator and as a public administrator.

Planning Commissioner

She is currently a consultant for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, and was a member of that commission from 1945 to 1948. During the five years previous Dr. Woolston served in turn with the OPA, the Foreign economic Administration, and the American Association of University Women.

Dr. Woolston received her A.B. and M.A. degrees in History at Stanford University in 1934. The following two years she attended the London School of Economics. In 1940 [sic] she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and earned degrees of M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Radcliffe-Harvard.

Source: Haverford News. Tuesday, February 13, 1951, p. 1.

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Textbook

Maxine Y. Woolston. Basic Information on the American Economy. Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1953. [186 pages]

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Minimum Wage Commission for Restaurant, Hotel, and Motel industries

“The state Labor and Industry Department has named a new nine-member board to recommend minimum wage rates for women and minors employed in the restaurant hotel and motel industries”. Dr. Maxine Woolston, of Bryn Mawr College and Mrs. Sadie T. M. Alexander, Philadelphia attorney were public representatives.

Source: The Daily Courier, Connellsville, PA, 16 July 1958, p. 1.

 

Image Sources: Maxine Yaple, portrait from Stanford University Quad Yearbook, 1932. Page. 160. Standing picture from the 1933 yearbook, p. 152.