This is one of those cases where one sorely misses the final examination for the first-term of a two-term course. Next time I go to the Harvard archives, I’ll have to check whether I have systematically overlooked the mid-year exams, or the keepers of the Harvard record merely limited themselves to mostly just collecting the exams administered at the end of each academic year. Maybe some visitor to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror happens to check this and let us all know by posting a welcome comment.
Anyhow, this posting continues the current series of exams that correspond to syllabi and course reading lists already transcribed since I have set up shop (not quite two years ago). The 1939-40 undergraduate honors course in economic theory at Harvard was taught by the team of Edward Chamberlin, Wassily Leontief and Overton Taylor.
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Final Examination
Economic Theory (Honors degree candidates)
Professor Chamberlin, Dr. O. H. Taylor, and Associate Professor Leontief
1939-40
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
ECONOMICS 1
Answer SIX questions, including number 7 or 8.
- Explain the concept of the “period of production” in its connection with the theory of interest.
- Is the marginal productivity theory applicable to piece wages? Answer and discuss.
- Explain the relation between the wage rates and marginal physical productivity in the case in which the entrepreneur sells his product in a competitive market but at the same time holds the position of a monopolist on the labor market.
- Discuss the effect of increased interest rates upon the employment of labor as compared with the use of machines.
- How would the height of rent be determined if all land were of the same quality?
- “Pigou has tried in vain to build a useful ‘economics of welfare’ on the false assumptions, that society is a collection of (a) purely selfish and (b) perfectly rational individuals, who infallibly maximize their private gains and satisfactions; and that such a society can, nevertheless, develop a regime of institutions, laws, and policies under which there will be a complete agreement of all private interests with the public interest, and an economic process working automatically to maximize collective welfare.” Discuss the validity of that interpretation and condemnation of Pigou’s assumptions, and the problem, as you see it, of achieving ‘realism’ in the basic ideas of a theory of ‘welfare economics’.
- Explain, and discuss critically one of the following: (a) Knight’s thesis concerning the ‘limitations of scientific method in economics’; (b) Wolfe’s demand for a ‘functional welfare economics, using a generally accepted, psychologically grounded, norm of welfare’; or (c) Clark’s ‘experiments in non-Euclidean economics’.
- “Profits are a special type of differential income”. Discuss.
Final. 1940.
Source: Harvard University Archives. Harvard University. Final Examinations, 1853-2001 (HUC 7000.28, Box 5). Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Papers Printed for Final Examinations: History, History of Religions, … , Economics, … , Military Science, Naval Science, June 1940.
Image Source: From left to right: Chamberlin, Leontief, Taylor from the Harvard Class Album, 1939.