While the following report found in George Stigler’s papers at the University of Chicago archives is undated, it appears to have been written sometime soon after Arnold Harberger’s appointment in 1954. This is consistent with the sections of T. W. Schultz’s memo to the Dean Chancy D. Harris dated 22 September 1955 that deal with Economic Development.
[…]
- The broad area of Economic Development requires major attention and it should be placed high on our agenda as we develop plans and staff during the next few years:
- This area is needed to serve especially graduate students from foreign countries.
- The economic problems are important to the U.S. scene also.
- The Research Center for Economic Development and Cultural Change and importantly the “Journal” it has established need to be drawn into this new effort.
- Major new research resources are required.
[…]
Some Concrete Steps
[…]
- To establish the new enterprise now contemplated in Economic Development about $50,000 a year appears essential.In this area, a professorship, a visiting professor for each of the next several years, complementary staff, student research in a workshop and support for the Journal “Economic Development and Cultural Change.”
Cf. “Salt-water” Development Economics at the time:
Development economics à la M.I.T.
Development economics à la Harvard
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Report to Department of Economics on the Field of Economic Development
At its last meeting the Department of Economics discussed the possibility of establishing a special field in Economic Development and the Chairman appointed a Committee to report in preliminary fashion to the Department on this issue.
Whether a special new field should be established in the Department depends primarily on practical considerations. Economics, as a discipline, is a unified body of social science and logically the whole area of economic studies can be subdivided only into substantive and methodological and applied fields. However, there exist already in the department a whole series of applied fields, each of which is accepted as a separate specialty for research on the doctoral level. We have labor economics, international economics, agricultural economics, public finance, and others. The question which we may have to answer is whether economic development is a field of applied economics roughly commensurate with these others.
A special field in economics becomes established generally when there develops a literature centering around a body of related problems, which have common institutional background. The underlying basic theory is an integral part of general economic theory, but in the course of specialized work a number of theoretical issues come to be discussed in some detail in a given field which tend to attract the interest not so much of general economists but specialists in this field. The question of whether economic development may be regarded as special applied field boils down, therefore, to the question of (1) whether there exists a set of specialized theoretical propositions to which particular emphasis is being given by students interested in (or specializing in) economic development and (2) whether there is an institutional background in terms of which related problems (some of which may be theoretical and abstract and others of which may be practical-empirical) are being studied.
It seems to us that both of these conditions hold for economic development as it is being conceived now. Among theoretical contributions which have already been made we may refer to writings of P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey, J. Tinbergen, W. A. Lewis, M. Abramovitz, G. M. Meier, P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, W. W. Rostow, S. Kuznets, A. O.
Hirschman, Colin Clark, H. W. Singer, and others. We do not wish to enter into the discussion of the quality of any or all of these writings, but we believe that, in general competence and quality they are about equal with writings in other fields or economics during the last ten years. Certainly the literature on economic development is large (and if anything, growing) and a number of scholars who have not made the study or economic development a central concern have contributed some articles and papers to the discussion. (Among them are men like J. Viner, T. de Scitovsky, Hollis Chenery, Martin Bronfenbrenner, Henry C. Wallich and others.)
In addition to this literature which mainly deals with general or more special theoretical issues in economic development there is a vast and even more rapidly growing literature on the institutional and policy aspects of economic development. Here we are concerned mainly with the analysis of poor countries and we note a mass of problems which are pertinent, many of which go beyond the boundaries of strict economic analysis and reach over into anthropology, political science, or history. It would be futile to mention all the questions that arise in this context but as brief reminder we might suggest that such problems as Kuznets’ and other students’ discussion of historical and cross-national comparisons of patterns of growth (changes in labor force, level of income, rate of investment, etc.) is one big field of study, that questions of the patterns of resource allocation in poor societies is another, and that the problem of the formation of human capital with special reference to poor societies and their capacity of growth is a third. In addition, and especially in view of the manifold efforts to engage in developmental planning in many poor countries, we have a broad field for the analysis of economic policies of various kinds. It seems, therefore, that in terms of theoretical as well as practical, empirical, historical, and policy problems there exists a more or less well recognizable field of interest, that there is an abundant and rapidly growing literature, and that there is wide-awake interest in this field not only in this country, but in many other countries as well.
In addition there is considerable interest among the students in economic development. It is granted that many students who express an interest in economic development do so for wrong reasons, but it may be assumed that a large proportion (especially of the foreign students who come from the poor countries), have a genuine interest in studying the problems of poor countries and in acquainting themselves more fully with the institutional and analytical problems characteristic of these countries. It seems that this demand, to the extent to which it justifiably exists, should be recognized by the department and steps should be taken to try to meet it as far as possible.
The Department does not now have a regular program on the graduate level in economic development. Whereas in other applied fields, e.g., labor economics or agricultural economics, we have a set of well-designed and well-integrated courses (well-integrated with the offerings in general theory and among one another), we do not have such a program in economic development. This, however, can be remedied and if the Department decides to make economic development a field of its own, commensurate with other fields in the Department, instruction can be arranged to provide the necessary preconditions for research training.
In view of the arguments raised earlier, this committee recommends to the Department that economic development should be recognized as a field for the M. A. and the Ph. D. degree in the Department of Economics.
We would like to distinguish three possible actions that the department might take with respect to the field of economic development.
1) We can accept it as a field for the distribution requirement.
2) We can accept it as a field of concentration for the Master’s degree
3) We can accept it as a (preliminary examination) field for the Ph. D. degree.
We are in favor of taking actions (1) and (2) at the present time, and of deferring until some future date any action on (3). Our motives for this action are the following:
We recognize that a body of literature exists in the field of economic development, and that the bulk of economists think of economic development as a “legitimate” field of specialization, and we see no point whatsoever for us to be offering courses in the field (as we now do) and at the same time “snub” the field when it comes to distribution requirements. Hence, we are for action (1).
There is considerable interest, particularly among our foreign students, in the field of economic development. There also appears to be at least latent interest among the faculty in offering additional courses in the field, at least if this does not entail a net addition to the teaching load of the individuals in question. We favor expanding our offerings in the field of economic development to the extent that this can be done without jeopardizing the rest of our program. With one course additional to our present offerings, we will be giving our students enough background in the field to warrant our accepting it as a field of concentration for the Master’s degree. Hence, we are for action (2). But if we take action (2) we should make sure that we add at least one course which really covers the core of the economic development literature.
The reason for deferring action (3) at the present time is that the courses that we are now offering in the field of economic development have arisen as a result of the special interests of members of our faculty in particular topics in the field and do not reflect any attempt at an organized “coverage” of the field such as we have in other areas. Before taking the step of offering Ph. D. examinations in economic development, we feel we should (a) decide on what we as a department feel should be the scope and general content of a Ph. D. field in economic development, and (b) develop a set of courses, presumably including some which we do not at present give, whose content reflects this decision.
It seems to us that the basic decision of the department on the first question should be whether our work in the field of economic development should mainly focus on a critical survey and evaluation of the work that now goes on under the label of economic development, or whether we should aim at having a field of somewhat broader scope. One suggestion for broadening the scope of the field is that we include in it some courses designed more directly than our present offerings to prepare students for the kinds of problems that the bulk of economists in underdeveloped countries in fact have to face, even though such courses would also be listed under present fields as well as economic development.
Arnold Harberger
D. Gale Johnson
Bert F. Hoselitz
Source: University of Chicago Archives. George Stigler Papers, Box 3, Folder “U of C. Econ. Miscellaneous”.
Image Source: Arnold C. Harberger, 1957 Fellowship in Economics from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Colorized by Economics in the Rear-View Mirror.