Tag: ClarkJB

Categories
Amherst Chicago Columbia Economists

Columbia. John Maurice Clark. Autobiographical notes, 1949

 

The following recollections of John Maurice Clark of his earliest contacts with economic problems is found in a folder of his papers containing notes about his father, John Bates Clark. The hand-written notes are fairly clear until we come to a clear addition on the final page. Abbreviations are used there and the handwriting is not always clear. Still the pages together provide a few nice stories and short lists of J.M. Clark’s teachers and students.

______________________

June 8, 1949

J.M.C.’s recollections of his earliest contacts with economic problems.

I think my earliest contact with an economic problem came on learning that the carpenter who sometimes came to do odd jobs for us at 23 Round Hill got $2.00 a day. I had a special interest in that carpenter. He was a tall man, with a full, dark beard; and it had been my imprudent interest in his operation with the kitchen double-windows (putting on? taking off?) that led me to lean out of a hammock and over the low rail of our second-story porch, to watch him (I was between two and three at the time). Mechanical consequences—I descended rapidly, landing on my head, but apparently suffering no injury except biting my tongue. Subjective consequences – maybe it pounded a little caution into me at an early age; but the present point is that it fixed that carpenter in my memory as “the man who picked me up.” It was some time later I learned that he got $2.00 a day.

I don’t remember whether I took the initiative and asked, or not. The cost of things was often discussed in our house, and my mother often talked of the difficulty of making both ends meet. I knew my father’s salary, though I can’t be sure now whether it was $3,500 or less. Anyhow, it was maybe eight or ten times the carpenter’s pay; and I began wondering how he made both ends meet, and remarked to my father that $2.00 a day wasn’t much to live on. He answered that it was pretty good pay for that kind of work. So I learned there were two ways of looking at a daily stipend—as income to live on and as the price of the service you gave your employer. Or perhaps simply the standpoints of the recipient and the payer. But especially I learned there were people who had to adjust their ideas of what they could live on, to a fraction of the income we found skimpy for the things we thought of as necessary. In short, I had a lesson in classes and their multiple standards to ponder over; without reaching any very enlightening conclusions.

I don’t think I connected this with our friends the Willistons (of the family connected with Williston seminary in Easthampton) who lived in the big house above us and from whom we rented ours. They were evidently much richer than we. They had gone to Europe (and been shipwrecked on the way, and had to transfer at sea to a lumber-schooner, which threw its deckload of lumber overboard to enable it to take on the people from the helpless steamship. — but that’s another story.)

To return to the carpenter. I suppose today he’d get perhaps $16, more?, and a Smith College salary, for a full professor, might be $7,000 or $8,000. The discrepancy has shrunk to maybe 2/5—certainly less than half—of what it was then. That puzzling discrepancy was my first lesson in economics—the first I remember.

There was another lesson—if you could call it that—the summer we spent a while at the Stanley House (now gone) in Southwest Harbor, on Mt. Desert. The rich people went to Bar Harbor. At Southwest, there was Mr. Brierly who had a yacht. We took our outings in a rowboat, sometimes with the help of a spritsail. One time we were going up Somes Sound, and were passed by one of the biggest ocean-going steam yachts—the “Sultana”. It was a very impressive sight, in those narrow waters, and looked about as big as the “Queen Mary” would to me now. I don’t remember anybody doing any moralizing; but if they did, the impression it left was that we, in our fashion, were doing the same kind of thing they were.

My first contact with economic literature (not counting the subversive economics of Robin Hood, which we boys knew by heart, in the Howard Pyle version) was at 23 Round Hill, so I must have been less than nine. I found a little book on my father’s shelves that had pictures in it – queer pictures done in pen and ink, which puzzled me. There was a boy not much bigger than I was, in queer little knee-britches, acting as a teacher to a class of grown men (including I think a Professor Laughlin, under whom I later taught at the University of Chicago.) And there were classical females being maltreated by brutal men, and other queer things. I was curious enough to read some of the text, to find out about the pictures. It was “Coin’s Financial School,” the famous free-silver tract.

I read enough to become a convinced free-silverite. And then I had the shock of discovering that my beloved and respected father was on the wrong side of that question. I decided there must be more to it than I’d gotten out of the queer picture-book. I suppose that was my first lesson in the need of preserving an open mind and holding economic ideas subject to possible reconsideration. Davenport and Veblen gave me more extensive lessons, fifteen or twenty years later, only this second time it was my father’s ideas I had to rethink, after reluctantly admitting that these opposing ideas represented something real, that needed to be reckoned with. One had to do something about it, though the something didn’t mean substituting Veblen for my father. It was a more difficult and discriminating adjustment that was called for.

To return to my boyhood. It may have been about this time that I learned something about mechanical techniques, when my father took me to see the Springfield Arsenal. They had a museum, with broadswords that had been used in battle—one was so nicked up that its edge had disappeared in a continuous series of surprisingly deep nicks—but the mechanical process that impressed me was a pattern-lathe, rough-shaping the stocks of Krags. On one side was a metal model of the finished stock revolving, with a wheel revolving against it. On the other side was the wooden blank revolving, and a wheel like the one on the model, and linked to it so as to copy its movements, and armed with knives. So the machine could make complicated shapes following any model you put into it, and do it faster and more accurately that a hand worker.

Incidentally (and as a digression) that was our first military rifle with smokeless powder, more powerful than black; our first regular military magazine rifle of the modern kind with a bolt action and a box magazine. The regulars were just getting them. The militia still had the black-powder 45-70 Springfields at the time of the Spanish War, and a Massachusetts regiment had to be ordered off the firing-line at El Caney because their smoke made too good a target. Teddy Roosevelt had pull enough to get Krag carbines for his Rough Riders plus the privilege of using their own Winchesters if individuals preferred, and, if they had the 30-40-220, which took the Krag cartridge.

But my regular education in economic theory began at the age of 9 or 10, in our first year at Amherst, when we lived on Amity Street, opposite Sunset Ave. My father had in mind James Mill’s training of his son, John Stuart Mill, and he copied the techniques of explaining something during a walk, but he didn’t follow James Mill’s example by making me submit a written report for criticism and revision. All he did was to explain about diminishing utility and marginal utility—using the illustration of the oranges. And he was satisfied that I understood it, and concluded that the simple fundamentals of economics could be taught to secondary school or “grammar-school” students. Later, my friend and former graduate student, Leverett Lyon, pithily remarked that I probably understood it better then than I ever had since. Maybe he was right. I know when I met Professor Fetter, the year the Ec. Ass. met in Princeton, he told me I didn’t understand the theory, because I had said (in print, I think) that there were some dangers about the concept of “psychic income.” I didn’t say it was wrong, but I did think it was likely to be misleading to use a term that was associated with accountants’ arithmetic. So I did probably understand the theory “better” at the age of 9 or 10. Twenty ears later, it didn’t look so simple. This was long before I disagreed with Fetter about basing-point pricing and the rightness of the uniform FOB mill price, as the price “true” competition would bring about.

______________________

J.M.C. later history.

Amherst, C in Ec tho 85 on exam, & written work not credited. (cf French A from Wilkins, C from [William Stuart] Symington (father of present (1951) W. Stuart Symington, head of nat security Resources Board). Symie sized my attitude up as that of a gentleman & gave me a gentleman’s mark)ache Crook said he “didn’t get hold” of me. He was correct.

 

Columbia: Giddings, A. S. Johnson, H.L. Moore, Seligman, Seager, Hawkins [?], Chaddock, Agger, Jacobstein. indoctrinated: J. B. C. orthodoxy modified by overhead costs (catalogued as “dynamics”) Dynamics (defined as) everything statics leaves out. & much induction. Take “Essentials” on slow dictation.

Veblen: slow infiltration of its logical & progre[?] rel. to the abstractions of J.B.C.: reverse normalizing might make[?] an arguable claim to equal legitimacy.

1912 ed. of Control of Trusts

“Contribution to theory of competive price” [QJE, August 1914] forerunner of “mon-comp”, largely empirical basis.

Germs of social & inst. ec. Rich-poor, Freedom as val in ec.[??] B. M. Anderson cf. Cooley

Revs of Hobson?, Pigou, Davenport Economics of Enterprise [Political Science Quarterly, Vol 29, no. 2]

 

To Chi. 1915 Changing basis of economic responsibility [JPE, March 1916] on moving to Chi. open declar[ation] of non-Laughlinism: backfire to an Atlantic article of Laughlin’s.

Modern Psych.

1917-18. War-ec. (“basis of war-time collectivism.”)

Students: Garver oral. Slichter, Lyon, Innis, Martin [?], Goodrich, Copeland, O’Grady [John O’Grady ?]

Ayres, Knight on faculty.

Ov. C. [Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs]

Social Control [of Business]

 

Columbia. Students, Friedman, Ginzberg, Salera, Kuznets’ oral

 

Source: Columbia University Archives. John M. Clark Collection. History of Economic Thought. Box 37, Folder “J. B. Clark, 1847-1938”.

Image Source: John Maurcie Clark. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-0171.  Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Categories
Barnard Columbia Courses Curriculum

Columbia. Economics Courses with Descriptions, 1905-07

 

 

From time to time I mistakenly repeat the preparation of an artifact, as is the case with this list of instructors and courses offered in economics and social sciences by the Columbia University Faculty of Political Science in 1905-07. Still, I am getting better with respect to formatting, so I am replacing the V1.0 with this V2.0 today.

________________________________

OFFICERS OF INSTRUCTION
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
[Economics and Social Sciences (1905-07)]

EDWIN R. A. SELIGMAN, Ph.D., LL.D., McVickar Professor of Political Economy
[Absent on leave in 1905-06.]
FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Sociology
JOHN B. CLARK, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Political Economy
HENRY R. SEAGER, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, and Secretary
HENRY L. MOORE, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor of Political Economy
VLADIMIR G. SIMKHOVITCH, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor of Economic History
EDWARD THOMAS DEVINE, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Social Economy

OTHER OFFICERS

ALVIN S. JOHNSON, Ph.D., Instructor in Economics
GEORGE J. BAYLES, Ph.D Lecturer in Ecclesiology [A.B., Columbia, 1891; A.M., 1892; LL.B., 1893; Ph.D., 1895.]
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS, Ph.D., Lecturer in Sociology in Barnard College

________________________________

GROUP III—ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

GRADUATE COURSES

It is presumed that students who take economics, sociology or social economy as their major subject are familiar with the general principles of economics and sociology as set forth in the ordinary manuals. Students who are not thus prepared are recommended to take the courses in Columbia College or Barnard College designated as Economics 1 and 2 (or A and 4) and Sociology 151-152.

The graduate courses fall under three subjects: A—Political Economy and Finance; B—Sociology and Statistics; C—Social Economy.

Courses numbered 100 to 199 are open to Seniors in Columbia College.

Courses numbered 200 and above are open to graduate women students upon the same terms as to men.

All the courses are open to male auditors. Women holding the first degree may register as auditors in Courses numbered 200 and above.

Subject A—Political Economy and Finance

ECONOMICS 101-102—Taxation and Finance. Professor SELIGMAN.
M. and W. at 1.30. 422 L.

This course is historical, as well as comparative and critical. After giving a general introduction and tracing the history of the science of finance, it treats of the various rules of the public expenditures and the methods of meeting the same among civilized nations. It describes the different kinds of public revenues, including the public domain and public property, public works and industrial undertakings, special assessments, fees, and taxes. It is in great part a course on the history, theories, and methods of taxation in all civilized countries. It considers also public debt, methods of borrowing, redemption, refunding, repudiation, etc. Finally, it describes the fiscal organization of the state by which the revenue is collected and expended, and discusses the budget, national, state, and local. Although the course is comparative, the point of view is American. Students are furnished with the current public documents of the United States Treasury and the chief financial reports of the leading commonwealths, and are expected to understand all the facts in regard to public debt, revenue, and expenditure contained therein.

Given in 1906-07 and in each year thereafter.

ECONOMICS 103—Money and Banking. Professor H. L. MOORE.
Tu. and Th. at 10.30, first half-year. 415 L.

The aim of this course is (1) to describe the mechanism of exchange and to trace the history of the metallic money, the paper money, and the banking system of the United States; to discuss such questions as bi-metallism, foreign exchanges, credit cycles, elasticity of the currency, present currency problems, and corresponding schemes of reform; (2) to illustrate the quantitative treatment of such questions as variations in the value of the money unit, and the effects of appreciation and depreciation.

ECONOMICS 104—Commerce and Commercial Policy. Dr. JOHNSON.
Tu. and Th. at 10.30, second half-year. 415 L.

In this course the economic bases of modern commerce, and the significance of commerce, domestic and foreign, in its relation to American industry, will be studied. An analysis will be made of the extent and character of the foreign trade of the United States, and the nature and effect of the commercial policies of the principal commercial nations will be examined.

ECONOMICS 105—The Labor Problem. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, first half-year. 415 L.

The topics considered in this course are: The rise of the factory system, factory legislation, the growth of trade unions and changes in the law in respect to them, the policies of trade unions, strikes, lockouts, arbitration and conciliation, proposed solutions of the labor problem, and the future of labor in the United States.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 106—The Trust Problem. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, second half-year. 415 L.

In this course special attention is given to the trust problem as it presents itself in the United States. Among the topics considered are the rise and progress of industrial combinations, the forms of organization and policies of typical combinations, the common law and the trusts, anti-trust acts and their results, and other proposed solutions of the problem.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

[ECONOMICS 107—Fiscal and Industrial History of the United States. Professor SELIGMAN.
M. and W. at 3.30, first half-year. 415 L.

This course endeavors to present a survey of national legislation on currency, finance, and taxation, including the tariff, together with its relations to the state of industry and commerce. The chief topics discussed are: The fiscal and industrial conditions of the colonies; the financial methods of the Revolution and the Confederation; the genesis of the protective idea; the fiscal policies of the Federalists and of the Republicans; the financial management of the War of 1812; the industrial effects of the restrictive and war periods; the crises of 1819, 1825, and 1837; the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828; the distribution of the surplus and the Bank war; the currency problems before 1863; the era of “free trade,” and the tariffs of 1846 and 1857; the fiscal problems of the Civil War; the methods of resumption, conversion and payment of the debt; the disappearance of the war taxes; the continuance of the war tariffs; the money question and the acts of 1878, 1890, and 1900; the loans of 1894-96; the tariffs of 1890, 1894, and 1897; the fiscal aspects of the Spanish War. The course closes with a discussion of the current problems of currency and trade, and with a general consideration of the arguments for and against protection as illustrated by the practical operations of the various tariffs.

Not given in 1905-07.]

[ECONOMICS 108— Railroad Problems; Economic, Social, and Legal. Professor SELIGMAN.
M. and W. at 3.30, second half-year. 415 L.

These lectures treat of railroads in the fourfold aspect of their relation to the investors, the employees, the public, and the state respectively. A history of railways and railway policy in America and Europe forms the preliminary part of the course. The chief problems of railway management, so far as they are of economic importance, come up for discussion.

Among the subjects treated are: Financial methods, railway constructions, speculation, profits, failures, accounts and reports, expenses, tariffs, principles of rates, classification and discrimination, competition and pooling, accidents, and employers’ liability. Especial attention is paid to the methods of regulation and legislation in the United States as compared with European methods, and the course closes with a general discussion of state versus private management.

Not given in 1905-07.]

ECONOMICS 109 — Communistic and Socialistic Theories. Professor CLARK.
Tu. and Th. at 2.30, first half-year. 406 L.

This course studies the theories of St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Rodbertus, Marx, Lassalle, and others. It aims to utilize recent discoveries in economic science in making a critical test of these theories themselves and of certain counter-arguments. It examines the socialistic ideals of distribution, and the effects that, by reason of natural laws, would follow an attempt to realize them through the action of the state.

ECONOMICS 110 — Theories of Social Reform. Professor CLARK.
Tu. and Th. at 2.30, second half-year. 406 L.

This course treats of certain plans for the partial reconstruction of industrial society that have been advocated in the United States, and endeavors to determine what reforms are in harmony with economic principles. It treats of the proposed single tax, of the measures advocated by the Farmers’ Alliance, and of those proposed by labor organizations, and the general relation of the state to industry.

ECONOMICS 201—Economic Readings I: Classical English Economists. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, first half-year. 415 L.

In this course the principal theories of the English economists from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill are studied by means of lectures, assigned readings and reports, and discussions. Special attention is given to the Wealth of Nations, Malthus’s Essay on Population, the bullion controversy of 1810, the corn law controversy of 1815, and the treatises on Political Economy of Ricardo, Senior, and John Stuart Mill.

Given in 1905-06 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 202—Economic Readings II: Contemporary Economists. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, second half-year. 415 L.

In this course the theories of contemporary economists are compared and studied by the same methods employed in Economics 201. Special attention is given to Böhm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital and Marshall’s Principles of Economics.

Given in 1905-06 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 203-204—History of Economics. Professor SELIGMAN.
M. and W. at 3.30. 415 L.

In this course the various systems of political economy are discussed in their historical development. The chief exponents of the different schools are taken up in their order, and especial attention is directed to the wider aspects of the connection between the theories and the organization of the existing industrial society. The chief writers discussed are:

I. Antiquity: The Oriental Codes; Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Cato, Seneca, Cicero, the Agrarians, the Jurists.

II. Middle Ages: The Church Fathers, Aquinas, the Glossators, the writers on money, trade, and usury.

III. Mercantilists: Hales, Mun, Petty, Barbon, North, Locke; Bodin, Vauban, Boisguillebert, Forbonnais; Serra, Galiani ; Justi, Sonnenfels.

IV. Physiocrats: Quesnay, Gournay, Turgot, Mirabeau.

V. Adam Smith and precursors: Tucker, Hume, Cantillon, Stewart.

VI. English school: Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, McCulloch, Chalmers, Jones, Mill.

VII. The Continent: Say, Sismondi, Cournot, Bastiat; Herrmann, List, von Thünen.

VIII. German historical school: Roscher, Knies, Hildebrandt.

IX. Recent Development—England: Rogers, Jevons, Cairnes, Bagehot, Leslie, Toynbee, Marshall; Germany: Wagner, Schmoller, Held, Brentano, Cohn, Schäffle; Austria: Menger, Sax, Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser; France: Leroy Beaulieu, Laveleye, Gide, Walras; Italy: Cossa, Loria, Pantaleoni; America: Carey, George, Walker, Clark, Patten, Adams.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 205—Economic Theory I. Professor CLARK.
M. and W. at 2.30, first half-year. 406 L.

This course discusses, first, the static laws of distribution. If the processes of industry were not changing, wages and industry would tend to adjust themselves according to certain standards. A study of the mechanism of production would then show that one part of the product is specifically attributable to labor, and that another part is imputable to capital. It is the object of the course to show that the tendency of free competition, under such conditions, is to give to labor, in the form of wages, the amount that it specifically creates, and also to give to capital, in the form of interest, what it specifically produces. The theory undertakes to prove that the earnings of labor and of capital are governed by a principle of final productivity, and that this principle must be studied on a social scale, rather than in any one department of production. The latter part of this course enters the field of Economic Dynamics, defines an economic society and describes the forces which so act upon it as to change its structure and its mode of producing and distributing wealth.

ECONOMICS 206—Economic Theory II. Professor CLARK.
M. and W. at 2.30, second half-year. 406 L.

This course continues the discussion of the dynamic laws of distribution. The processes of industry are actually progressing. Mechanical invention, emigration and other influences cause capital and labor to be applied in new ways and with enlarging results. These influences do not even repress the action of the static forces of distribution, but they bring a new set of forces into action. They create, first, employers’ profits, and, later, additions to wages and interest. It is the object of the course to show how industrial progress affects the several shares in distribution under a system of competition, and also to determine whether the consolidations of labor and capital, which are a distinctive feature of modern industry, have the effect of repressing competition. It is a further purpose of the course to present the natural laws by which the increase of capital and that of labor are governed and to discuss the manner in which the earnings of these agents are affected by the action of the state, and to present at some length the character and the effects of those obstructions which pure economic law encounters in the practical world.

ECONOMICS 207—Theory of Statistics. Professor H. L. MOORE.
Tu. and Th. at 1.30, first half-year. 418 L.

The aim of this course is to present the elementary principles of statistics and to illustrate their application by concrete studies in the chief sources of statistical material. The theoretical part of the course includes the study of averages, index numbers, interpolation, principles of the graphic method, elements of demography, and statistical principles of insurance. The laboratory work consists of a graded series of problems designed to develop accuracy and facility in the application of principles. (Identical with Sociology 255.)

ECONOMICS 208—Quantitative Economics I: Advanced Statistics. Professor H. L. MOORE.
W. and F. at 11.30, second half-year. 418 L.

Quantitative Economics I and II (see Economics 210) investigate economics as an exact science. This course treats economics from the inductive, statistical side. It aims to show how the methods of quantitative biology and anthropology are utilized in economics and sociology. Special attention is given to recent contributions to statistical theory by Galton, Edgeworth, and Pearson. Economics 207, or an equivalent, is a prerequisite.

Given in 1905-06 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 210—Quantitative Economics II: Mathematical Economics. Professor H. L. MOORE.
W. and F. at 11.30, second half-year. 418 L.

This course treats economics from the deductive side. It aims to show the utility of an analytical treatment of economic laws expressed in symbolic form. The work of Cournot is presented and used as a basis for the discussion of the contributions to the mathematical method by Walras, Marshall, and Pareto. Economics 207, or an equivalent, is a prerequisite.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

ECONOMICS 241—The Economic and Social Evolution of Russia since 1800. Professor SIMKHOVITCH.
M. and F. at 9.30, first half-year. 418 L.

This course describes the economic development of the country, the growth of slavophil, liberal and revolutionary doctrines and parties, and the disintegration of the autocratic régime. (Identical with History 281.)

ECONOMICS 242—Radicalism and Social Reform as Reflected in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Professor SIMKHOVITCH.
M. at 9.30 and 10.30, second half-year. 418 L.

An interpretation of the various types of modern radicalism, such as socialism, nihilism, and anarchism, and of the social and economic conditions on which they are based.

ECONOMICS 291-292—Seminar in Political Economy and Finance. Professors SELIGMAN and CLARK.
For advanced students. Tu., 8.15-10.15 P.M. 301 L.

 

Subject B—Sociology and Statistics

SOCIOLOGY 151-152—Principles of Sociology. Professor GIDDINGS.
Tu. and Th. at 3.30. 415 L.

This is a fundamental course, intended to lay a foundation for advanced work. In the first half-year, in connection with a text-book study of theory, lectures are given on the social traits, organization, and welfare of the American people at various stages of their history and students are required to analyze and classify sociological material of live interest, obtained from newspapers, reviews, and official reports. In the second half-year lectures are given on the sociological systems of important writers, including Montesquieu, Comte, Spencer, Schäffle, De Greef, Gumplowicz, Ward, and Tarde. This course is the proper preparation for statistical sociology (Sociology 255 and 256) or for historical sociology (Sociology 251 and 252).

SOCIOLOGY 251—Social Evolution—Ethnic and Civil Origins. Professor GIDDINGS.
F. at 2.30 and 3.30, first half-year. 415 L.

This course on historical sociology deals with such topics as (1) the distribution and ethnic composition of primitive populations; (2) the types of mind and of character, the capacity for coöperation, the cultural beliefs, and the economic, legal, and political habits of early peoples; (3) early forms of the family, the origins, structure, and functions of the clan, the organization of the tribe, the rise of the tribal federations, tribal feudalism, and the conversion of a gentile into a civil plan of social organization. Early literature, legal codes, and chronicles, descriptive of the Celtic and Teutonic groups which combined to form the English people before the Norman Conquest, are the chief sources made use of in this course.

SOCIOLOGY 252—Social Evolution—Civilization, Progress, and Democracy. Professor GIDDINGS.
F. at 2.30 and 3.30, second half-year. 415 L.

This course, which is a continuation of Sociology 251, comprises three parts, namely: (1) The nature of those secondary civilizations which are created by conquest, and of the policies by which they seek to maintain and to extend themselves; (2) an examination of the nature of progress and of its causes, including the rise of discussion and the growth of public opinion; also a consideration of the policies by which continuing progress is ensured,—including measures for the expansion of intellectual freedom, for the control of arbitrary authority by legality, for the repression of collective violence, and for the control of collective impulse by deliberation; (3) a study of the nature, the genesis, and the social organization of modern democracies, including an examination of the extent to which non-political associations for culture and pleasure, churches, business corporations, and labor unions, are more or less democratic; and of the democratic ideals of equality and fraternity in their relations to social order and to liberty. The documents of English history since the Norman Conquest are the chief sources made use of in this course.

SOCIOLOGY 255—Theory of Statistics. Professor H. L. MOORE.
Tu. and Th. at 1.30, first half-year. 418 L.

This course is identical with Economics 207 (see [above]).

SOCIOLOGY 256—Social Statistics. Professor GIDDINGS.
Tu. and Th. at 1.30, second half-year. 418 L.

Actual statistical materials, descriptive and explanatory of contemporaneous societies, are the subject-matter of this course, which presupposes a knowledge of statistical operations (Sociology 255) and applies it to the analysis of concrete problems. The lectures cover such topics as (1) the statistics of population, including densities and migrations, composition by age, sex, and nationality, amalgamation by intermarriage; (2) statistics of mental traits and products, including languages, religious preferences, economic preferences (occupations), and political preferences; (3) statistics of social organization, including families, households, municipalities, churches, business corporations, labor unions, courts of law, army, navy, and civil service; (4) statistics of social welfare, including peace and war, prosperity, education or illiteracy, vitality, and morality, including pauperism and crime.

SOCIOLOGY 259—Ecclesiology. Dr. BAYLES.
Tu. and F. at 4.30, first half-year. 405 L.

The purpose of this course is to define the present relations of the ecclesiastical institutions to the other institutions of American society: the state, the government, marriage, family, education, and public wealth. An analysis is made of the guarantees of religious liberty contained in the federal and commonwealth constitutions; of the civil status of churches in terms of constitutional and statute law; of the methods of incorporation, of the functions of trustees, of legislative and judicial control; of denominational polity according to its type; of the functional activity of churches in their departments of legislation, administration, adjudication, discipline, and mission; of the influence of churches on ethical standards; of the distribution of nationalities among the denominations, of the territorial distribution of denominational strength, of the relation of polity to density of population, and of the current movements in and between various organizations tending toward changes of functions and structure.

SOCIOLOGY 279-280—Seminar in Sociology. Professor GIDDINGS.
W. at 3.30 and 4.30, bi-weekly. 301 L.

The Statistical Laboratory, conducted by Professors GIDDINGS and H. L. MOORE, is equipped with the Hollerith tabulating machines, comptometers, and other modern facilities.

Subject C—Social Economy

SOCIAL ECONOMY 281—Poverty and Dependence. Professor DEVINE.
Th. and F. at 4.30, first half-year. 418 L.

The purpose of this course and of Social Economy 282, which follows, is to study dependence and measures of relief, and to analyze the more important movements which aim to improve social conditions. An attempt is made to measure the extent of dependence, both in its definite forms, as in charitable and penal institutions, and in its less recognized and definite forms, as when it results in the lowering of the standard of living or the placing of unreasonably heavy burdens upon children or widows. Among the special classes of social debtors which are studied, besides the paupers, the vagrants, the dissipated, and the criminals, who require discipline or segregation as well as relief, are: Orphans and other dependent children; the sick and disabled; the aged and infirm; the widow and the deserted family; the immigrant and the displaced laborer; the underfed and consequently short-lived worker.

Given in 1905—06 and in alternate years thereafter.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 282—Principles of Relief. Professor DEVINE.
Th. and F. at 4.30, second half-year. 418 L.

In this course the normal standard of living is considered concretely to secure a basis from which deficiencies may be estimated. A large number of individual typical relief problems are presented, and from these, by a “case system,” analogous to that of the modern law school, the principles of relief are deduced. Among the larger movements to be considered are: Charity organization; social settlements; housing reform; the elimination of disease; the restriction of child labor; and the prevention of overcrowding, and especially the congestion of population in the tenement-house districts of the great cities.

Given in 1903-06 and in alternate years thereafter.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 283—Pauperism and Poor Laws. Professor SEAGER.
M. at 3.30 and 4.30, first half-year. 418 L.

This is an historical and comparative course intended to supplement Social Economy 281 and 282. Lectures on the history of the English poor law are followed by discussions of farm colonies, the boarding-out system for children, old-age pensions, and other plans of relief currently advocated in England. On this basis the public relief problems of New York State and City and the institutions attempting their solution are studied by means of excursions, lectures, and discussions.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 285—The Standard of Living. Professor DEVINE.
Th. and F. at 4.30, first half-year. 418 L.

A concrete study of the standard of living in New York City in the classes which are above the line of actual dependence, but below or near the line of full nutrition and economic independence. While this course will not be given in the year 1905-06, assignments will be made in the School of Philanthropy for research in such portions of this field as suitably prepared students may elect to undertake.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 286—The Prevention and Diminution of Crime. Professor DEVINE.
Th. and F. at 4.30, second half-year. 418 L.

This course will deal with the social function of the penal and police systems. Special attention will be given to such subjects as juvenile courts; the probation system; indeterminate sentence; treatment of discharged prisoners; the system of local jails; segregation of incorrigibles, and prison labor.

Given in 1906-07 and in alternate years thereafter.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 290—Crime and Criminal Anthropology. Professor GIDDINGS.

Students desiring to make a special study of crime, criminal anthropology, and the theory of criminal responsibility may take the lectures of Sociology 256 or of Social Economy 286 and follow prescribed readings under the direction of Professor GIDDINGS.

SOCIAL ECONOMY 299-300—Seminar in Social Economy. Professor DEVINE.
Two hours a week. Hours to be arranged.

The work of the Seminar for 1905-07 will be a study of recent developments in the social and philanthropic activities of New York City; e. g., the social settlements; parks and playgrounds; outside activities of public schools; children’s institutions; relief societies; agencies for the aid of immigrants, and the preventive work of organized charities.

COURSES IN THE SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY

The School of Philanthropy, conducted by the Charity Organization Society, under the direction of Professor Devine, offers courses* aggregating not less than ten hours a week throughout the academic year, and also a Summer School course of six weeks in June and July. These courses are open to regular students of Columbia University who satisfy the director that they are qualified to pursue them with profit, and are accepted as a minor for candidates for an advanced degree.

The program of studies for 1905-06 is as follows:

            A—General survey (forty lectures) ; B—Dependent families (fifty lectures); C—Racial traits and social conditions (thirty-five lectures); D—Constructive social work (fifty lectures) ; E—Child-helping agencies (forty lectures); F—Treatment of the criminal (thirty lectures); G—Administration of charitable and educational institutions (thirty lectures); H—The State in its relation to charities and correction (forty lectures).

* These courses are given in the United Charities Building, corner Fourth Avenue and 22d Street.

 

COURSES IN COLUMBIA COLLEGE

ECONOMICS 1-2—Introduction to Economics—Practical Economic Problems. Professors SELIGMAN and SEAGER, and Dr. JOHNSON.
Section 1, M. and W. at 9.30, and F. at 11.30. Section 2, M., W., and F. at 11.30. M. and W. recitations in 415 L. F. lecture in 422 L.

 

COURSES IN BARNARD COLLEGE

ECONOMICS A—Outlines of Economics. Professor MOORE and Dr. JOHNSON.
Three hours, first half-year.
Section 1, Tu., Th., and S. at 9.30. Section 2, Tu. and Th. at 11.30, and S. at 9.30.

ECONOMICS 4—Economic History of England and the United States. Professor MOORE and Dr. JOHNSON.
M., W., and F. at 10.30, second half-year.

ECONOMICS 105—The Labor Problem. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 1.30, first half-year.

The topics treated in this course are the rise of the factory system, factory legislation, the growth of trade unions and changes in the law in respect to them, the policies of trade unions, strikes, lockouts, arbitration and conciliation, proposed solutions of the labor problem, and the future of labor in the United States.

ECONOMICS 120—Practical Economic Problems. Professor SEAGER.
Tu. and Th. at 1.30, second half-year.

The topics treated in this course are the defects in the monetary and banking systems of the United States, government expenditures and government revenues, protection vs. free trade, the relation of the government towards natural monopolies, and federal control of trusts.

ECONOMICS 121—English Social Reformers. Professor MOORE.
W. and F. at 1.30, first half-year.

A critical study of the social teachings of Carlyle, Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Kingsley, and Thomas H. Green.
Open to students that have taken Course A or an equivalent.

ECONOMICS 122—Economic Theory. Professor MOORE.
W. and F. at 1.30, second half-year.

A critical study of Marshall’s Principles of Economics. The principal aim of this course is to present the methods and results of recent economic theory.
Open to students that have taken Course A or an equivalent.

ECONOMICS 109—Communistic and Socialistic Theories. Professor CLARK.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, first half-year.

In this course a brief study is made of the works of St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, and Lassalle, and a more extended study is made of Marx’s treatise on capital. Recent economic changes, such as the formation of trusts and strong trade unions, are examined with a view to ascertaining what effect they have had on the modern socialistic movement.

ECONOMICS 110—Theories of Social Reform. Professor CLARK.
Tu. and Th. at 11.30, second half-year.

In this course a study is made of modern semi-socialistic movements and of such reforms as have for their object the improvement of the condition of the working class. Municipal activities, factory legislation, the single tax, recent agrarian movements and measures for the regulation of monopolies are studied.

SOCIOLOGY 151-152—Principles of Sociology. Professor GIDDINGS.
Tu. and Th. at 2.30.

This is a fundamental course, intended to lay a foundation for advanced work. In the first half-year, in connection with a text-book study of theory, lectures are given on the social traits, organization, and welfare of the American people at various stages of their history, and students are required to analyze and classify sociological material of live interest, obtained from newspapers, reviews, and official reports. In the second half-year, lectures are given on the sociological systems of important writers, including Montesquieu, Comte, Spencer, Schäffle, De Greef, Gumplowicz, Ward, and Tarde.

SOCIOLOGY 153-154 —Family Organization. Dr. ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS.
Tu. at 3.30, bi-weekly.

Field work in the study of family groups. Consultations.
Open to Seniors.

In connection with the lectures and field work of this course opportunities are given to students to become acquainted with the more important private institutions for social betterment in New York City, and to study the organization and activity of the various public agencies charged with the welfare of the community.

 

COURSES IN THE SUMMER SESSION

sA—Economic History of England and America. Lectures, recitations, and essays. Dr. JOHNSON.
Five hours a week at 1.30. 501 F. Credit I
(Equivalent, when supplemented by prescribed reading, to Economics 4.)

sB—Principles of Economics. Lectures and class discussions. Dr. JOHNSON.
Five hours a week at 2.30. 501 F. Credit I.
(Equivalent, when supplemented by prescribed reading, to Economics 1.)

sA1—Principles of Sociology. Descriptive and theoretical. Professor GIDDINGS.
Five hours a week at 10.30. 415 L. Credit I, II.
(Equivalent to Sociology IS1-)

sA2—Principles of Sociology. History of sociological theory. Professor GIDDINGS.
Five hours a week at 9.30. 415 L. Credit I, II.
(Equivalent to Sociology 152.)

Source: Columbia University. Bulletin of Information. Courses Offered by the Faculty of Political Science and the Several Undergraduate Faculties. Announcement 1905-07. pp. 3, 24-36.

Image Source: Roberto Ferrari, Unveiling Alma Mater [Sept 23, 1903]. Columbia University Libraries. July 15, 2104.

Categories
Amherst Columbia Economists Germany Johns Hopkins Smith

Columbia. John Bates Clark, Faculty Memorial Minute, 1938

 

Memorial minutes give us a snapshot appreciation of a deceased economist by colleagues. One really doesn’t read these to get any new significant items for the biography, one hopes instead to cull some insight into the minds and hearts of those who knew both the person and the work. “Innate modesty and a genuine kindliness” are a pair of expressed recessive traits that perhaps help to distinguish John Bates Clark from brilliant economic theorists of more recent vintage.

This biographical note for Clark from 1894 provides an earlier testimony.

____________________

Memorial minute for Professor J. B. Clark
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
April 22, 1938

 

JOHN BATES CLARK
1847-1938

In recording the death of Professor Emeritus John Bates Clark on March 21, 1938, at the age of ninety-one, the Faculty of Political Science is moved not only by a feeling of loss but also by a feeling of gratitude for great services rendered to mankind.

Born in Providence in 1847 and graduated from Amherst in 1872, Professor Clark set an example followed in the next three decades by scores of young American economists in going to Germany for graduate work. The interests in historical and anthropological studies that he cultivated in Heidelberg and Zürich were lasting characteristics of his mind—a fact often overlooked by commentators upon his later work.

On returning to this country, he began the searching analysis of economic relations that developed gradually into his peculiar contribution to social sciences. A little later than W. Stanley Jevons in England, Karl Menger in Austria, and Leon Walras in France, but quite independently of them and with an emphasis all his own, Professor Clark discovered how the utility of goods influences their values and prices. A collection of his early papers, The Philosophy of Wealth, published in 1885, revealed him as the keenest economic theorist of his time and country.

After teaching at Carleton, Smith, Amherst, and Johns Hopkins, Professor Clark joined this Faculty in 1895. It was while teaching at Columbia that he developed the full implications of his insights. His way of seeking to understand the complicated processes of economic life was to seize upon a set of fundamental factors, and to examine what results they would produce in the absence of disturbing circumstances. Work of this character obviously required logical powers of a high order and constructive imagination. What is less commonly appreciated, to make the results significant the work must be guided by sound intuitive judgments regarding the factors to be admitted to the problems treated and the factors to be excluded. How admirably Professor Clark’s judgment served him and how cogently he reasoned upon the basis of his assumptions were demonstrated by The Distribution of Wealth, published in 1899. That book still stands as the most important contribution of our country to pure economic theory.

Professor Clark’s later books, The Control of the Trusts, 1901, The Problem of Monopoly, 1904, and The Essentials of Economic Theory, 1907, show how effectively he could use his abstract constructions in dealing with practical problems, and how he could bridge the gulf that seemed to yawn between the timeless statis state of his Distribution of Wealth and the ever shifting condition of the work in which real men make their livings.

Of the service that Professor Clark rendered as the first Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, his co-workers in that field can speak with fuller knowledge than we possess. But we may note that no one deficient in a sense of reality, and no one without fervent interest in the welfare of his kind could have planned and carried through as he did the detailed record of the horrible sufferings that the War of 1914-1918 brought upon the world.

With intellectual distinction and integrity there was joined in Professor Clark and innate modesty and a genuine kindliness that won the affection of all who came into personal contact with him. Of what we deem finest in human achievement and character he was an example to be cherished and emulated.

 

Source: Columbia University Archives. Minutes of the Faculty of Political Science, 1920-1939. pp. 825-6.

Image Source: Amherst Yearbook Olio ’96 (New York, 1894), pp. 7-9. Picture above from frontispiece. Another link.

Categories
Curriculum Yale

Yale. Undergraduate and Graduate Courses in Economics, 1899-1900

 

 

Occasionally Economics in the Rear-view Mirror will post the economics course offerings at leading U.S. and Canadian universities at the turn of the twentieth century. Today we have both undergraduate and graduate course offerings in economics and social science at Yale for 1899/1900. While Irving Fisher was already member of the Yale Faculty, he was in the middle of a three year struggle with tuberculosis, returning to teaching (part-time) in the fall term of 1901. We see that John Bates Clark was brought in to teach a course on theories of income distribution. For those who find the discipline name “sociology” somewhat ugly, they will discover here that William G. Sumner appeared to have a certain fondness for the alternative “Societology“. 

_____________________

 

 

Catalogue Yale University 1899/1900,
pp. 66-70

II. POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW
[Undergraduate Courses, Yale College]

 

30 Economics. 3 hrs.

Lectures: Wednesday and Saturday, 11.30. 12 divisions,
Monday to Saturday, 8.30.

President Hadley and Professor Schwab.

            Two hours a week will be devoted to lectures,—for two-thirds of the year by President Hadley on the general problems of production, exchange and distribution of wealth; for the remaining time by Professor Schwab on money and monetary questions. The third hour will be occupied by a quiz-exercise in small sections under an assistant.
Text-books: Hadley’s Economics and Jevons’ Money and the Mechanism of Exchange.

 

31 Statistics. 2 hrs.

Monday and Thursday, 12.30.

Dr. Bailey.

            The sources and reliability of statistical data are discussed, and the methods of distinguishing true and false inferences are pointed out. Index numbers are studied, and the lectures treat of statistics of population, crime, suicide, property, etc. The attempt is made to determine the laws which govern the group actions of men.
Mayo-Smith’s Statistics and Sociology is used as a basis.

 

The following courses (32 to 38 inclusive) are open only to those who have already studied elementary economics.

 

32 Finance. [Seniors.] 3 hrs.

Monday and Thursday, 11.30, A1 O; divisions
I, Monday, 8.30.
II, Wednesday, 8.30.
III, Friday, 8.30.
IV, Tuesday, 12.30.

Professor Schwab.

            A course on Money, Banking, and Finance. Two hours a week will be devoted to lectures, one hour a week to quiz-exercises in small sections under Dr. Bailey.
Text-books: White, Money and Banking, Dunbar, Banking; Greene, Corporation Finance, and Plehn, Public Finance.

 

33 United States Industrial History. [Seniors.] 3 hrs.

Tuesday and Friday, 11.30, A1 O; divisions
I, Tuesday, 8.30.
II, Wednesday, 12.30.
III, Saturday, 8.30.
IV, V, Saturday, 9.30.

President Hadley and Professor Schwab.

A course on the history of the tariff legislation and industrial development of the United States. Two hours a week will be devoted to lectures—for two-thirds of the year by Professor Schwab on tariff history, foreign commerce and industrial organization; for the remaining time by President Hadley on railroads. The third hour will be occupied by a quiz-exercise in small sections under Dr. Bailey.

Text-books: Taussig, Tariff History of the United States (edition 1898); Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism; Hadley, Railroad Transportation, and Newcomb, Railway Economics.

 

34 Mathematical Economics. [Seniors.] 2 hrs.

Wednesday and Saturday, 10.30.

Mr. Gaines.

The course is prefaced by a few lessons in elementary calculus. These are followed by the analysis of: I, value and prices; II, general price-levels; III, effects of “appreciation” and “depreciation,” with statistical discussion; IV, bimetallism and other currency schemes, with especial reference to the experience of France, Austria, and India; V, international trade; VI, capital and interest; VII, distribution.

Cournot’s Mathematical Theory of Wealth and Fisher’s Introduction to the Calculus; Value and Prices, and Appreciation and Interest, are used as a basis. Reading is also assigned in other works, especially recent investigations. Special papers are read by members of the class.

 

35 Debates on Public Questions. [Seniors.] 2 hrs.

Tuesday, 4.00 to 5.50.

Dr. Raynolds.

Members of the class will be expected to organize debates each week on subjects of public interest; to prepare and interchange briefs, and argue the questions at issue on the basis of special study and investigation.

 

36 Theories of Distribution. [Seniors.] 2 hrs.

Friday, 2.00 to 3.50.

Professor J. B. Clark.

A comparative study of theories of the Distribution of Wealth. An outline of recent theories of Wages, Interest and Profits is presented and is compared with the doctrines of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, Mill and Cairnes. A study is made of the relation of changes in the processes of industry and in the structure of society to Economics as a science; and a view is afforded of the natural relation of the deductive method of study to the historical method. It is an object of the course to accomplish a certain constructive work, and to utilize the results of comparative studies in determining positive laws of distribution.

 

38 United States Financial History. [Seniors.] 1 hr.

Wednesday, 12.30, E2 O.

Professor Schwab.

An investigation course in the financial history of the United States. The periods selected for study are the years 1873–1900; and the topics investigated are those connected with the silver agitation.

 

40 The Science of Society. [Seniors.] 2 hrs.

Monday and Thursday, 8.30, A1 O.

Professor Sumner.

An elementary course, with text-book lessons and examinations, in Anthropology and Ethnology, with the origin of civilization and the development of institutions. In connection with this will be a course of lectures on Systematic Sociology [Societology]. Topics are: The organization of society; the individual and the social; social forces; militarism and industrialism; property; marriage, family, and the status of women; primitive notions in religion and philosophy; civil government, law and rights; slavery and classes; economic interests and their collisions; conditions of welfare; origin of moral standards; reaction of reason on experience. These topics are treated exclusively in the light of Historical Anthropology and Ethnology.

 

41 The Science of Society. [Seniors.] 2 hrs., to count as 3 hrs.

Monday and Thursday, 8.30, A1 O.

Professor Sumner.

A course with a German text-book (Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1887), for those who are able to read difficult German. The exercises are coincident with those of course 40, including the lectures as above.
[Those who take this course are responsible for providing themselves with the text-book before Sept. 28.]

 

45 Jurisprudence and Law. [Seniors.] 2 hrs.

First term: Friday and Saturday, 12.30, A1 O.

Mr. Gager.

Lectures, recitations, private readings, and examinations on the following subjects: law in its relations to the origin, development, and government of political society; origin and development of customary law; relation of statute law to customary law; formation and development of codes of law; nature and origin of legal rights; principles of the law governing rights in land; principles of the law governing contract rights; the law of remedies for the violation of rights; origin and procedure of courts of law and equity; criminal law. The instruction in this course is designed to present an historical and philosophical view of the law in its great outlines, as common to all nations, and particularly as developed in the Anglo-Saxon race. In addition it is designed to show the practical methods which obtain in modern commercial transactions and the law as applied to them, and to point out the principal rights acquired, the duties owed, and the liabilities incurred in the every-day conduct of affairs.
To those exhibiting satisfactory evidence of having read the four books of Blackstone’s Commentaries in connection with this course, a special examination in Blackstone will be given. All who satisfactorily pass such special examination will be entitled to a certificate of having completed the reading of Blackstone.

Second term; Friday and Saturday, 12.30, A1 O.

Professor E. J. Phelps.

Lectures upon American Constitutional Law and upon International Law. Text-books are read in connection with the lectures. This course is not intended merely for those who are contemplating the study of the law as a profession, but for all who may be interested in the subjects as a branch of general education. Students who pursue the course and pass the graduating examination thereon, are entitled to a certificate which in many States is accepted as counting a year in the period of study required for admission to the bar.

* * * *

Catalogue Yale University 1899/1900, pp. 210-14

II. ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, HISTORY, LAW
[Graduate School]

President Hadley, LL.D. George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D.
Edward J. Phelps, LL.D. William H. Brewer, Ph.D.
Arthur M. Wheeler, LL.D. William G. Sumner, LL.D.
Charles H. Smith, LL.D. George B. Adams, Ph.D.
Henry W. Farnam, R. P. D. John B. Clark, Ph.D., LL.D.
William F. Blackman, Ph.D. Edward G. Bourne, Ph.D.
John C. Schwab, Ph.D. Irving Fisher, Ph.D.
George L. Fox, M.A. Edwin B. Gager, B.A.
Frederick Wells Williams, B.A. Walter I. Lowe, Ph.D.
William B. Bailey, Ph.D. Edward D. Collins, Ph.D.
John M. Gaines, B.A. Albert G. Keller, Ph.D.

ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Professor Sumner :—

1 Anthropology. 2 hrs.

A careful study of Ranke’s Der Mensch (2d ed.), with an examination of the separate topics by means of all the appropriate material.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

2 Systematic Societology; Section IV. a. 2 hrs.

An ethnological study of the development of the Mental Operations and of the growth and contents of the Mental Outfit of the human race, in the earlier stages; knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, world-philosophy, otherworldliness, industrial theories, mores, codes, mental training, traditional wisdom.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

3 Politics and Finance in the History of the United States. 2 hrs.

A study of the evolution of the institutions of the democratic republic, of the societal organization, and of the history of the money of account.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

4 The Industrial Revolution of the Renaissance Period. 2 hrs.

A chapter in the history of the development of the industrial organization. The industrial element in the Renaissance. The transition from medieval to modern society in its causes, new elements, effects on classes, effects on economic doctrine. Changes imposed on the industrial organization; world-commerce, land-tenure, handicrafts, banking, and money.
[Monday, 10.30 A.M. and Wednesday, 9.30 A. M.]

5 The Beginnings of the Industrial Organization. 2 hrs.

An ethnological study of the industrial organization from its earliest beginnings. Division of labor between the sexes and the special functions of each; regulation of industry; slavery; formation of capital; discoveries and inventions; domestication of animals and plants; money, etc.
[Wednesday and Thursday, 10.30 A.M.]

*6 The Science of Society. 2 hrs.

[See Course 40, page 68.]

*6a The Science of Society. 2 hrs.

[See Course 41, page 69.]

 

Professor J. B. Clark :—

7 History of Theories of Distribution.

A comparative study of theories of the Distribution of Wealth. An outline of recent theories of Wages, Interest and Profits is presented and is compared with the doctrines of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, Mill and Cairnes. A study is made of the relation of changes in the processes of industry and in the structure of society to Economics as a science; and a view is afforded of the natural relation of the deductive method of study to the historical method. It is an object of the course to accomplish a certain constructive work, and to utilize the results of comparative studies in determining positive laws of distribution.
[Friday, 2.00 to 3.50.]

 

Professor Farnam:—

8 Pauperism. 2 hrs. 1st term.

An examination of the nature and causes of indigence, the history of efforts to deal with it, and some of the modern problems arising in connection with it.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

9 The Modern Organization of Labor. 2 hrs. 2d term.

These lectures treat of the historical antecedents and the development during the nineteenth century of associations of wage-receivers. They therefore include an account of the structures, aims, and methods of such societies in different countries, together with a discussion of their relations to socialism, the factory system, labor disputes, labor legislation, workingmen’s insurance, provision for the unemployed, and other features of the modern industrial world.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

10 The Principles of Public Finance. 2 hrs.

A systematic survey of the means by which the expenditures of government are met, being had both to the economic principles involved and to the fiscal systems of modern states. Leading topics are: the budget, taxation (national and local), public debts, and state banks considered as aids to public credit.
[Not given in 1899–1900.]

 

President Hadley and Professor Schwab :—

*11 Economics. 2 hrs.

[See Course 30, page 66.]

*12 United States Industrial History. 2 hrs.

[See Course 33, page 67.]

 

Professor Schwab :-

*13 Finance. 2 hrs.

[See Course 32, page 66.]

*14 United States Financial History. 1 hr.

[See Course 38, page 68.]

15 The Finances of the Confederate States, 1867-65. 1 hr.

A course of lectures upon the financial and industrial history of the South during the Civil War.
[Tuesday, 10.30 A.M.]

 

Professor Blackman :—

16 Social Science. 2 hrs.

A study of some important problems of American life, such as the negro; the immigrant; the defective, dependent, vicious and criminal classes (charities and correction); the city; the wage and factory system; the family; and communism, socialism, and anarchism. The lectures are supplemented by reports and book-reviews by the students, and (probably) by a visit to the charity and correctional institutions of New York. As introductory to the course, a few lectures are given on the study and literature of Sociology.
[Wednesday and Saturday, 8.25 A. M.]

 

17 The Literature of Sociology. 2 hrs. 1st term.

A classification of the principal writers in “schools,” and a comparison and contrast of their points of view and methods: contractual (Rousseau), positivist (Comte), evolutionary (Spencer, Drummond), biological (Schäffle), psychological (Tarde, Durkheim, Le Bon, Simmel, Ward, Giddings, Baldwin), “groupwise” (Gumplowicz), observational, and statistical (Le Play, Quetelet), theocratic (Old Testament).
[Thursday, 10 A. M.]

18 A Sociological Study of the Family. 1 hr. 2d term.

Its biological and psychological bases; its history; matriarchy and patriarchy; polyandry, polygyny, monogamy; heredity, physical and social; prostitution, and divorce; the moral and social significance of the family.
[Thursday, 10 A. M.]

19 The Social Teaching and Influence of Christianity. 1 hr.

Selected portions of the following works will be studied and discussed: Friedländer’s Sittengeschichte Roms, Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, Mathews’s Social Teaching of Jesus, Schmidt’s Social Results of Early Christianity, Uhlhorn’s Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism and Die Christliche Liebesthätigkeit, Nash’s Genesis of the Social Conscience, Lecky’s History of European Morals, Dennis’s Christian Missions and Social Progress.
[Thursday, 8.25 A.M.]

 

Dr. Bailey :-

20 The Economic System of Classical Antiquity. 1 hr.

A critical study is made of the political and social institutions of Greece and Rome. The lectures treat of the income and expenditure of the state, the currency, credit instruments, poor relief, slavery, land tenure, commerce, trade regulations, marriage institutions, etc.
[Tuesday, 9.30 A.M.]

*21 Statistics. 2 hrs.

[See Course 31, page 66.]

 

Mr. Gaines :—

*22 Mathematical Economics. 2 hrs.

[See Course 34, page 67.]

 

Dr. Keller :—

23 Homeric Social Life.

A systematic study of Homeric social life from the direct documentary evidence of the Iliad and Odyssey; National Environment, Industrial Organization, Religion, Property, Marriage, Government and Classes will be studied in the light of Sociology and Culture-history. The comparative method will be used as far as possible, and an attempt will be made to “place” the Homeric Age in its various relations to general culture-development. The course will afford practice in the interpretation of historical documents and will be most profitably pursued by those able to read German or French.

 

 Image Source:  “Old Library, Yale Coll., New Haven, Conn.”The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1898 – 1931.

Categories
Barnard Columbia Economists

Columbia. Budgeting John Bates Clark’s Salary After His Retirement, ca. 1911

 

The following undated memorandum comes from Prof. E.R.A. Seligman’s papers in a folder of Columbia related material for 1911-1913. From the Bulletin of the Faculty of Political Science we know that Prof. Simkhovitch took over Clark’s course on socialism in 1908 (Seligman below writes that Simkhovitch gave a similar course “at Columbia for the last two or three years”). Robert E. Chaddock took up the statistics assistant professorship mentioned in the memo in 1911. So it is pretty clear that this memorandum was written to motivate the economics department decision not to seek a senior professor with the funds released by Clark’s retirement but instead divided the funds between hiring someone for statistics, additional compensation for Henry Roger Seager to continue his teaching a labor course at Barnard and additional compensation for Professor Vladimir Simkhovitch to take over Clark’s course on Socialism at Barnard.

_____________________________

MEMORANDUM in reference to PROFESSOR CLARK’S RETIREMENT.

Professor Clark’s retirement is a serious loss to the Department of Economics and to Barnard College. Ordinarily the withdrawal of such a distinguished member of the faculty should lead to the appointment of a successor of equal prominence. In this case, however, there is no one of equal distinction available, and after making a thorough and impartial survey of the field, the department is convinced that it will be wiser to call the most promising younger man to be found as assistant professor then to call in a full professor who might prove disappointing. This plan has the advantage, moreover, of permitting a readjustment of the courses in economics to be open to Barnard students that would be highly advantageous for the College.

It will be remembered that when the original arrangement was entered into the trustees of Barnard agreed to provide the sum of $5,000 toward the higher or university work in economics at Columbia, on condition that certain courses at Columbia be open to women graduates, and on the further understanding that the Department of Economics should provide six hours a week of lectures in economics to Barnard Seniors at Barnard College. Later on, by special arrangement with Dean Gill, as ratified by the trustees, it was provided that two of these six hours might be given at Columbia instead of Barnard. It is now proposed to readjust the courses so as to provide ampler opportunities for Barnard students.

In considering the interests of Barnard, three facts should be held in view. First, experience has shown that merely throwing open courses given at Columbia to Barnard students fails adequately to meet their needs. The plan adopted when Professor Clark was called here of having six hours advanced work in economics given at Barnard ought to be reintroduced. Second, the number of students desiring to take advanced work in economics is steadily increasing and for their benefit every opportunity should be seized which will open to them additional courses at Columbia. Third, the most important field of economics study not now covered by the courses offered at Barnard is that of economic and social statistics. Not only does the ordinary student need a knowledge of statistical methods to apply economic theories to the facts of every day life, but Barnard graduates are concerned to an ever increasing extent with different forms of social service. Some become the paid agents of settlement, charitable societies or municipal departments concerned with social work. Others become officers in reform and charitable organizations. For both classes, training in the manipulation and interpretation of statistics would be of great value.

Having regard to these three facts the plan which the Department of Economics recommends is as follows: –

(1) that $2,500 of the $5,000 released by Professor Clark’s withdrawal be used to pay the salary of an assistant professor, who shall give a course on social and economic statistics to Barnard Seniors. While this professor under the terms of the original agreement, is to be primarily a graduate professor, he may, if so desired, be asked temporarily to relieve Professor Mussey of one of the Junior sections in Economics A1–A2 in exchange for a university course by Professor Mussey. It is also proposed that in further recognition of a similar course to be given by the new instructor at Columbia and of supervising work in the statistical laboratory at Columbia, which might be open to Barnard students for research work, the Department of Economics should admit Barnard Seniors to Columbia courses given by Professors Seligman, Giddings, Seager, and Mussey, that is, Sociology 151-152, Economics 101-2, Economics 107-108, Economics 106, and Economics 104.

(2) That Professor Seager be asked to continue his course on the Labor Problem at Barnard and that a contribution of $1,500 towards his salary be paid out of the $5,000 released. Professor Clark’s withdrawal will add to Professor Seager’s burdens at Columbia and his natural inclination would be to meet the situation by discontinuing his course at Barnard. If he continues his course it seems but fair that a contribution toward his salary should be paid out of Barnard funds.

(3) That Professor Simkhovitch be asked to give at Barnard the course on Socialism and Social Reform formerly given by Professor Clark and that the remaining $1,000 of the $5,000 fund be contributed to his salary. Fortunately Professor Simkhovitch is specially qualified to give such a course acceptably, having given a similar course at Columbia for the last two or three years.

By carrying out this plan the Barnard trustees will not only secure a reintroduction of the six hours of advanced instruction in economics for the special benefit of Barnard Seniors, courses even better adapted to the present needs of such Seniors than those previously given, but will also secure admission for Barnard students to eight of the most valuable courses in economics and social science offered at Columbia, without any increase in the appropriation for economic instruction. Inasmuch as at the present time only four hours are given to Barnard Seniors, and only five Columbia courses are open to them, we believe that the plan is fair to all concerned and that it will prove highly advantageous to Barnard College.

 

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Seligman, Edwin Robert Anderson Collection. Box 98a, Folder “Columbia (A-Z) 1911-1913”.

Image Source:  Barnard College student council. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.

Categories
Columbia Curriculum Germany

Columbia. Political Economy Courses Compared to Courses at the University of Berlin, 1897

___________________

 

An excerpt from a newspaper report comparing political economy as taught in New York at Columbia University with political economy as taught in Berlin was published in the Columbia University Bulletin in 1897.  The unnamed author of the report concluded that “the primacy which Germany enjoyed a few years ago has passed away”. Compare this to a report (1884) overflowing with praise for the research “seminary” of  German universities.

___________________

In the Evening Post of October 25, 1897, will be found an interesting discussion of the value of German university degrees in comparison with similar honors in American universities. The writer, who is apparently a student in the University of Berlin, holds that the requirements for the degree of Ph. D. are higher in several American institutions than in the average German university. His points are, first, that it takes a shorter time to obtain the degree in Germany than from any of the reputable American universities; and second, that the average size and value of the dissertations of Harvard and Columbia doctors of philosophy are certainly greater than those of the German universities, with the exception, probably, of Berlin. Indeed, he concludes, “the progress of American universities has been so rapid in recent years, and the entrance requirements have been so largely increased, that the bachelor’s degree is actually approaching the German doctorate in essential worth.” A few selections from the body of the article, comparing the instruction in political science at Columbia with that given at Berlin, are of special interest.

“Further light on the question will be thrown by a comparison of the courses of lectures in American and German universities. Confining attention to the various studies in the domain of political economy and social science, we may select Berlin as the strongest representative of German Institutions.* * * * Of the American schools of political science, it is not easy to select the strongest. Columbia is usually regarded as the best equipped, although several others are but little inferior. Let us compare, then, the courses offered at Columbia and Berlin in political economy.

“At Berlin, Professor Wagner gives three courses, aggregating ten hours, that cover the field of general and theoretical economics, and practical economics, including money and banking, etc. At Columbia, almost precisely the same field is covered by Professor Mayo-Smith’s “Historical and Practical Economy,” running through three semesters and aggregating nine hours. Almost the only difference is that Professor Wagner devotes more time to agricultural economics, a subject that has as yet received little attention in American schools of political economy. In finance Professor Wagner offers a four-hour course for one semester. Professor Seligman at Columbia covers the same ground, with more discrimination, in a two-hour course running two semesters. He also offers in alternate years a two-hour course on the financial history of the United States.

“In economic or industrial history Columbia stands the comparison very well. It has an introductory course on the economic history of Europe and America conducted by Professor Seligman and Mr. Day, and an advanced course on the industrial and tariff history of the United States by Professor Seligman. The two courses aggregate the same number of hours as Professor Schmoller’s “practical political economy,” which is nothing but industrial history, and history of Prussia at that—a course valuable to the specialist, but not of great value to the average American student. Professor Meitzen also gives a course on the history of agriculture, but it concerns the early land systems of Europe and other subjects that can have no application to American conditions. The essential forms of land tenure are described at Columbia in Professor Mayo-Smith’s historical political economy.

“In the field of statistics, the subject of demography or population statistics is treated at Berlin by Professor Boeckh in a two-hour course, and at Columbia by Professor Mayo-Smith in a similar course. Economic statistics are treated by Professors Meitzen and Mayo-Smith in much the same manner, while the history, theory, and technique of statistics receives attention in both institutions.

“At Berlin, Professor Wagner reads a critique of socialism and Dr. Oldenburg gives its history. The two courses aggregate the same number of hours as Professor Clark’s course on socialism at Columbia. Professor Clark’s criticism of “scientific socialism” is at least equal to that of any German professor, and it proceeds from the Anglo-Saxon point of view. In a second semester Professor Clark deals with projects of social reform, especially those of American origin. Somewhat similar is Dr. Oldenburg’s course on Socialpolitik at Berlin, and Dr. Jastrow reads in addition a course on labor legislation.

“In social science Columbia is clearly in advance of Berlin. Sociology is scarcely recognized at the German universities, but at Berlin Dr. Simmel, privat-docent, offers a two-hour course on sociology and political psychology. This is the nearest approach to a study of the growth and structure of society that one finds at Berlin. Columbia, on the other hand, offers a course on the evolution of society and social institutions, with a review of the principal theoretical writers, and another course on sociological laws. These are both given by Professor Giddings, who also reads courses on crime and pauperism. No such practical study of these problems is made in Berlin.

“Several minor courses are offered at each university—as, for example, railway problems—and all of the professors conduct seminars for the purpose of encouraging and supervising original investigations. The only subject in which Berlin offers superior advantages is agricultural economics, while Columbia is doing much more work in both theoretical and practical social science. Two courses remain to be mentioned. One of these is a course by Dr. Jastrow at Berlin on the literature and methodology of all the political sciences, an introductory course of considerable value to freshmen, which has no parallel in any other German or American university known to the writer. But Columbia offers a course that can scarcely be duplicated in Germany, namely, the abstract theory of political economy given by Professor Clark, one of the acutest and most original thinkers of our day. It is a course that is taken by not more than a dozen or fifteen men, but they are advanced students who can appreciate such a course. Professor Clark’s power of inspiring young men to do theoretical work of high quality is evidenced by the writings of such men as the late Dr. Merriam, of Cornell, and Professor Carver, of Oberlin College. But in Germany pure theory has been neglected since the time of Hermann. Only now, as the result of an impulse proceeding from Austria, is theory regaining its place in German economic circles. Professor Dietzel and some of the other younger scholars are doing good work in this line, which is hardly comparable, however, with that of Professors Clark, Patten, etc., in the United States, and Marshall in England. German economists are making valuable contributions to economics in other ways, but the primacy which Germany enjoyed a few years ago has passed away.”

 

Source: Columbia University Bulletin, Vol. XVIII (December, 1897), pp. 67-69.

Image Source: The University of Berlin between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Digital ID: ppmsca 00342.

 

Categories
Columbia Economists

Columbia. History of Economics Department. Luncheon Talk by Arthur R. Burns, 1954

The main entry of this posting is a transcription of the historical overview of economics at Columbia provided by Professor Arthur R. Burns at a reunion luncheon for Columbia economics Ph.D. graduates [Note: Arthur Robert Burns was the “other” Arthur Burns of the Columbia University economics department, as opposed to Arthur F. Burns, who was the mentor/friend of Milton Friedman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Fed, etc.]. He acknowledges his reliance on the definitive research of his colleague, Joseph Dorfman, that was published in the following year:

Joseph Dorfman, “The Department of Economics”, Chapt IX in R. Gordon Hoxie et al., A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.

The cost of the luncheon was $2.15 per person. 36 members of the economics faculty attended, who paid for themselves, and some 144 attending guests (includes about one hundred Columbia economics Ph.D.’s) had their lunches paid for by the university.

_____________________________

[LUNCHEON INVITATION LETTER]

Columbia University
in the City of New York
[New York 27, N.Y.]
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

March 25, 1954

 

Dear Doctor _________________

On behalf of the Department of Economics, I am writing to invite you to attend a Homecoming Luncheon of Columbia Ph.D.’s in Economics. This will be held on Saturday, May 29, at 12:30 sharp, in the Men’s Faculty Club, Morningside Drive and West 117th Street.

This Luncheon is planned as a part of Columbia University’s Bicentennial Celebration, of which, as you know, the theme is “Man’s Right to Knowledge and the free Use Thereof”. The date of May 29 is chosen in relation to the Bicentennial Conference on “National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad” in which distinguished scholars and men of affairs from the United States and other countries will take part. The final session of this Conference, to be held at three p.m. on May 29 in McMillin Academic Theater, will have as its principal speaker our own Professor John Maurice Clark. The guests at the Luncheon are cordially invited to attend the afternoon meeting.

The Luncheon itself and brief after-luncheon speeches will be devoted to reunion, reminiscence and reacquaintance with the continuing work of the Department. At the close President Grayson Kirk will present medals on behalf of the University to the principal participants in the Bicentennial Conference.

We shall be happy to welcome to the Luncheon as guests of the University all of our Ph.D.’s, wherever their homes may be, who can arrange to be in New York on May 29. We very much hope you can be with us on that day. Please reply on the form below.

Cordially yours,

[signed]
Carter Goodrich
Chairman of the Committee

*   *   *   *   *   *

Professor Carter Goodrich
Box #22, Fayerweather Hall
Columbia University
New York 27, New York

I shall be glad…
I shall be unable… to attend the Homecoming Luncheon on May 29.

(signed) ___________

Note: Please reply promptly, not later than April 20 in the case of Ph.D.’s residing in the United States, and not later than May 5 in the case of others.

_____________________________

[INVITATION TO SESSION FOLLOWING LUNCHEON]

Columbia University
in the City of New York
[New York 27, N.Y.]
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

May 6, 1954

 

TO:                 Departments of History, Math. Stat., Public and Sociology
FROM:            Helen Harwell, secretary, Graduate Department of Economics

 

Will you please bring the following notice to the attention of the students in your Department:

            A feature of Columbia’s Bicentennial celebration will be a Conference on National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad, to be held May 27, 28 and 29.

            The final session of the Conference will take place in McMillin Theatre at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 29. The session topic is “Economic Welfare in a Free Society”. The program is:

Session paper.

John M. Clark, John Bates Clark Professor. Emeritus of Economics, Columbia University.

Discussants:

Frank H. Knight, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
David E. Lilienthal, Industrial Consultant and Executive
Wilhelm Roepke, Professor of International Economics, Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva

 

Students in the Faculty of Political Science are cordially invited to attend this session and to bring their wives or husbands and friends who may be interested.

Tickets can be secured from Miss Helen Harwell, 505 Fayer.

_____________________________

[REMARKS BY PROFESSOR ARTHUR ROBERT BURNS]

Department of Economics Bicentennial Luncheon
May 29th, 1954

President Kirk, Ladies and Gentlemen: On behalf of the Department of Economics I welcome you all to celebrate Columbia’s completion of its first two hundred years as one of the great universities. We are gratified that so many distinguished guests have come, some from afar, to participate in the Conference on National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad. We accept their presence as testimony of their esteem for the place of Columbia in the world of scholarship. Also, we welcome among us again many of the intellectual offspring of the department. We like to believe that the department is among their warmer memories. We also greet most pleasurably some past members of the department, namely Professors Vladimir G. Simkhovitch, Eugene Agger, Eveline M. Burns and Rexford Tugwell. Finally, but not least, we are pleased to have with us the administrative staff of the department who are ceaselessly ground between the oddity and irascibility of the faculty and the personal and academic tribulations of the students. Gertrude D. Stewart who is here is evidence that this burden can be graciously carried for thirty-five years without loss of charm or cheer.

We are today concerned with the place of economics within the larger scope of Columbia University. When the bell tolls the passing of so long a period of intellectual endeavor one casts an appraising eye over the past, and I am impelled to say a few retrospective words about the faculty and the students. I have been greatly assisted in this direction by the researches of our colleague, Professor Dorfman, who has been probing into our past.

On the side of the faculty, there have been many changes, but there are also many continuities. First let me note some of the changes. As in Europe, economics made its way into the university through moral philosophy, and our College students were reading the works of Frances Hutcheson in 1763. But at the end of the 18th century, there seems to have been an atmosphere of unhurried certainty and comprehensiveness of view that has now passed away. For instance, it is difficult to imagine a colleague of today launching a work entitled “Natural Principles of Rectitude for the Conduct of Man in All States and Situations in Life Demonstrated and Explained in a Systematic Treatise on Moral Philosophy”. But one of early predecessors, Professor Gross, published such a work in 1795.

The field of professorial vision has also change. The professor Gross whom I have just mentioned occupied no narrow chair but what might better be called a sofa—that of “Moral Philosophy, German Language and Geography”. Professor McVickar, early in the nineteenth century, reclined on the even more generous sofa of “Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Rhetoric, Belles Lettres and Political Economy”. By now, however, political economy at least existed officially and, in 1821, the College gave its undergraduates a parting touch of materialist sophistication in some twenty lectures on political economy during the last two months of their senior year.

But by the middle of the century, integration was giving way to specialization. McVickar’s sofa was cut into three parts, one of which was a still spacious chair of “History and Political Science”, into which Francis Lieber sank for a brief uneasy period. His successor, John W. Burgess, pushed specialization further. He asked for an assistant to take over the work in political economy. Moreover, his request was granted and Richmond Mayo Smith, then appointed, later became Professor of Political Economy, which, however, included Economics, Anthropology and Sociology. The staff of the department was doubled in 1885 by the appointment of E. R. A. Seligman to a three-year lectureship, and by 1891 he had become a professor of Political Economy and Finance. Subsequent fission has separated Sociology and Anthropology and now we are professors of economics, and the days when political economy was covered in twenty lectures seem long ago.

Other changes stand out in our history. The speed of promotion of the faculty has markedly slowed down. Richmond Mayo Smith started as an instructor in 1877 but was a professor after seven years of teaching at the age of 27. E. R. A. Seligman even speeded matters a little and became a professor after six years of teaching. But the University has since turned from this headlong progression to a more stately gait. One last change I mention for the benefit of President Kirk, although without expectation of warm appreciation from him. President Low paid J. B. Clark’s salary out of his own pocket for the first three years of the appointment.

I turn now to some of the continuities in the history of the department. Professor McVickar displayed a concern for public affairs that has continued since his time early in the nineteenth century. He was interested in the tariff and banking but, notably, also in what he called “economic convulsions”, a term aptly suggesting an economy afflicted with the “falling sickness”. Somewhat less than a century later the subject had been rechristened “business cycles” to remove some of the nastiness of the earlier name, and professor Wesley Mitchell was focusing attention on this same subject.

The Columbia department has also shown a persistent interest in economic measurement. Professor Lieber campaigned for a government statistical bureau in the middle of the 19th century and Richmond Mayo Smith continued this interest in statistics and in the Census. Henry L. Moore, who came to the department in 1902, promoted with great devotion Mathematical Economics and Statistics with particular reference to the statistical verification of theory. This interest in quantification remains vigorous among us.

There is also a long continuity in the department’s interest in the historical and institutional setting of economic problems and in their public policy aspect. E. R. A. Seligman did not introduce, but he emphasized this approach. He began teaching the History of Theory and proceeded to Railroad Problems and the Financial and Tariff History of the United States, and of course, Public Finance. John Bates Clark, who joined the department in 1895 to provide advanced training in economics to women who were excluded from the faculty of Political Science, became keenly interested in government policy towards monopolies and in the problem of war. Henry R. Seager, in 1902, brought his warm and genial personality to add to the empirical work in the department in labor and trust problems. Vladimir G. Simkhovitch began to teach economic history in 1905 at the same time pursuing many and varied other interests, and we greet him here today. And our lately deceased colleague, Robert Murray Haig, continued the work in Public Finance both as teacher and advisor to governments.

Lastly, among these continuities is an interest in theory. E. R. A. Seligman focused attention on the history of theory. John Bates Clark was an outstanding figure in the field too well known to all of us for it to be necessary to particularize as to his work. Wesley C. Mitchell developed his course on “Current Types of Economic Theory” after 1913 and continued to give it almost continuously until 1945. The Clark dynasty was continued when John Maurice Clark joined the department as research professor in 1926. He became emeritus in 1952, but fortunately he still teaches, and neither students nor faculty are denied the stimulation of his gentle inquiring mind. He was the first appointee to the John Bates Clark professorship in 1952 and succeeded Wesley Mitchell as the second recipient of the Francis A. Walker medal of the American Economic Association in the same year.

Much of this development of the department was guided by that gracious patriarch E. R. A. Seligman who was Executive Officer of the Department for about 30 years from 1901. With benign affection and pride he smiled upon his growing academic family creating a high standard of leadership for his successors. But the period of his tenure set too high a standard and executive Officers now come and go like fireflies emitting as many gleams of light as they can in but three years of service. Seligman and J. B. Clark actively participated in the formation of the American Economic Association in which J. B. Clark hoped to include “younger men who do not believe implicitly in laisser faire doctrines nor the use of the deductive method exclusively”.

Among other members of the department I must mention Eugene Agger, Edward Van Dyke Robinson, William E. Weld, and Rexford Tugwell, who were active in College teaching, and Alvin Johnson, Benjamin Anderson and Joseph Schumpeter, who were with the department for short periods. Discretion dictates that I list none of my contemporaries, but I leave them for such mention as subsequent speakers may care to make.

When one turns to the students who are responsible for so much of the history of the department, one is faced by an embarrassment of riches. Alexander Hamilton is one of the most distinguished political economists among the alumni of the College. Richard T. Ely was the first to achieve academic reputation. In the 1880’s, he was giving economics a more humane and historical flavor. Walter F. Wilcox, a student of Mayo Smith, obtained his Ph.D. in 1891 and contributed notably to statistical measurement after he became Chief Statistician of the Census in 1891, and we extend a special welcome to him here today. Herman Hollerith (Ph.D. 1890) contributed in another way to statistics by his development of tabulating machinery. Alvin Johnson was a student as well as teacher. It is recorded that he opened his paper on rent at J. B. Clark’s seminar with the characteristically wry comment that all the things worth saying about rent had been said by J. B. Clark and his own paper was concerned with “some of the other things”. Among other past students are W. Z. Ripley, B. M. Anderson, Willard Thorp, John Maurice Clark, Senator Paul Douglas, Henry Schultz and Simon Kuznets. The last of these we greet as the present President of the American Economic Association. But the list grows too long. It should include many more of those here present as well as many who are absent, but I am going to invite two past students and one present student to fill some of the gaps in my story of the department.

I have heard that a notorious American educator some years ago told the students at Commencement that he hoped he would never see them again. They were going out into the world with the clear minds and lofty ideals which were the gift of university life. Thenceforward they would be distorted by economic interest, political pressure, and family concerns and would never again be the same pellucid and beautiful beings as at that time. I confess that the thought is troubling. But in inviting our students back we have overcome our doubts and we now confidently call upon a few of them. The first of these is George W. Stocking who, after successfully defending a dissertation on “The Oil Industry and the Competitive System” in 1925, has continued to pursue his interest in competition and monopoly as you all know. He is now at Vanderbilt University.

The second of our offspring whom I will call upon is Paul Strayer. He is one of the best pre-war vintages—full bodied, if I may borrow from the jargon of the vintner without offense to our speaker. Or I might say fruity, but again not without danger of misunderstanding. Perhaps I had better leave him to speak for himself. Paul Strayer, now of Princeton University, graduated in 1939, having completed a dissertation on the painful topic of “The Taxation of Small Incomes”.

The third speaker is Rodney H. Mills, a contemporary student and past president of the Graduate Economics Students Association. He has not yet decided on his future presidencies, but we shall watch his career with warm interest. He has a past, not a pluperfect, but certainly a future. Just now, however, no distance lends enchantment to his view of the department. And I now call upon him to share his view with us.

So far we have been egocentric and appropriately so. But many other centres of economic learning are represented here, and among them the London School of Economics of which I am proud as my own Alma Mater. I now call upon Professor Lionel Robbins of Polecon (as it used sometimes to be known) to respond briefly on behalf of our guests at the Conference. His nature and significance are or shall I say, is, too well known to you to need elaboration.

[in pencil]
A.R. Burns

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections, Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection, Box 9, Folder “Bicentennial Celebration”.

_____________________________

[BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION FOR ARTHUR ROBERT BURNS]

 

BURNS, Arthur Robert, Columbia Univ., New York 27, N.Y. (1938) Columbia Univ., prof. of econ., teach., res.; b. 1895; B.Sc. (Econ.), 1920, Ph.D. (Econ.), 1926, London Sch. of Econ. Fields 5a, 3bc, 12b. Doc. dis. Money and monetary policy in early times (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., London, 1926). Pub. Decline of competition (McGraw-Hill 1936); Comparative economic organization (Prentice-Hall, 1955); Electric power and government policy (dir. of res.) (Twentieth Century Fund, 1948) . Res. General studies in economic development. Dir. Amer. Men of Sci., III, Dir. of Amer. Schol.

Source: Handbook of the American Economic Association, American Economic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (July, 1957), p. 40.

 

Obituary: “Arthur Robert Burns dies at 85; economics teacher at Columbia“, New York Times, January 22, 1981.

Image: Arthur Robert Burns.  Detail from a departmental photo dated “early 1930’s” in Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections, Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection, Box 9, Folder “Photos”.

Categories
Amherst Courses Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins University. Theory of Distribution, John Bates Clark, 1892

When John Bates Clark held lectures on the theory of distribution at Johns Hopkins University in autumn 1892, he was also holding down two academic jobs in Massachusetts where he was Professor of Political Science and History at Smith College and Professor of Political Economy at Amherst College.

One presumes what he taught in his Hopkins course were his papers “The Law of Wages and Interest” (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1890)  and “Distribution as Determined by a Law of Rent”  (Quarterly Journal of Economics, April 1891) as well as his response to Walker’s criticism (QJE, July  1891) published as “The Statics and the Dynamics of Distribution” (QJE, October 1891).

 

Source: John Bates Clark: A Memorial. Privately printed, p. 10.  For Smith College, see the faculty list in Smith College, Official Circular, No. 19 (1892), p. 50.

______________________

If you find this posting interesting, here is the complete list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have assembled thus far. You can subscribe to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror below. There is also an opportunity for comment following each posting….

_____________________________________

[Amherst College Catalogue for 1892-93]

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

A topical analysis of the subject, with references to important authorities, is made the basis of the work. In the class-room the course is carried on by means of recitations, discussions, lectures, abstracts, essays, and frequent examinations. A syllabus of the results attained is placed in the hands of each student daily.

First Term: four hours a week. — Economic Theory. An analysis of industrial society, the aim of which is thorough acquaintance with the Principles of PoliticalEconomy and correct methods of analysis. — Mill, Walker, Clark, Marshall.

Second Term: four hours a week. — The Silver Question; the Problem of Distribution; the Principles of Taxation, with especial reference to the Tariff Question; Theories of Free Trade and Protection; the History of Tariff Legislation in the United States; the Existing Tariff; Public Credit.
The work of this term is open to those only who have taken the first term.

Third Term: four hours a week. — The Theory of Distribution; the Labor Question; Socialism; Social Reform; Immigration.
The work of this term is open to those only who have taken the first term.

 

Source: Catalogue of Amherst College for the Year 1892-93, pp. 31-32.

_____________________________________

 

[Abstract of a course of lectures before the students in History and Politics, Oct.-Nov., 1892.]

On the Theory of Distribution. By John B. CLARK.

It was the object of the course to demonstrate the working of the forces that apportion the income of society among various claimants. To most men the gaining of a personal income presents itself as a process in distribution. A man does not keep the things that he himself produces, but secures for his own use a share of the things that others produce. The amount of the income appears to vary according to the terms that the recipient is able to make with those with whom he deals. That some law governs those terms is generally believed; but an accepted theory of distribution is lacking.

The course tried to make it clear that the law that is sought connects distribution with production. It causes the share of the social income that one recipient would receive, if conditions were quite normal, to correspond with the amount that he has contributed toward the creation of that income. Under natural law a man consumes things that other people make; but he gets and uses the value, or abstract quantum of wealth, that he himself brings into existence. “To each his product” is the rule, under free exchange and perfect competition.

In studying the mechanism by which this effect is secured, it is necessary, first, to ascertain, not what income accrues to particular men, but what attaches to the performing of certain functions. A man may perform several: he may be a laborer, a capitalist and an employer of laborer and capital. A purely economic theory of distribution accounts for the gains secured by working, by furnishing capital or by employing men and capital. A further and more distinctly sociological study accounts for the merging of various functions in the same men, and gives a resulting social distribution of wealth. The two studies together account for the size of the incomes of different persons and of different social classes.

In practical life static forces and dynamic ones are in action together. There are influences at work that would continue to produce their effects if society were reduced to a stationary state. Other influences depend on progress; these act when the economic world is in a transitional condition, leaving behind it one position of static equilibrium and advancing toward another. In life the dynamic influences succeed each other perpetually, and the stationary condition is never reached; but the static forces operate throughout the progressive movement. Isolating these forces and separately examining them affords one key to success in a study of distribution. The division of gains that takes place between employer and employed in one industry is to be kept in its true relation to the general distribution of the income of society as a whole. The non-competing groups and sub- groups that constitute an industrial society have been studied, and thereby the sources of the wages and interest earned in different employments have been determined.

The law that fixes the amount of wages and that of interest, in the whole social field, has been revealed by the use of a formula that is commonly applied in determining the rent of land. The central principle of the theory is that of so-called “diminishing returns.” In its broader and more scientific use the principle causes labor to become less productive per unit when more of it is applied in connection with a fixed amount of capital; and it causes capital to yield less per unit when an increasing quantity of it is used in connection with a limited amount of labor.

The character and effects of the chief dynamic influences were examined, and some of the conditions of the future well-being of society as a whole and of different social classes were determined.

 

Source: The Johns Hopkins University. University Circulars. Vol. XII, No. 105 (May 1893), p. 83.

Image Source: The Amherst Olio ’96 (1894).

Categories
Economists Socialism

Carleton College. John Bates Clark on the Meanings of Socialism, 1879

The following essay was written by one of the (then) not-ready-for-prime-time American economists, John Bates Clark, in his early thirties when he was teaching political economy and history at Carleton College in Northridge, Minnesota where (and when) Thorstein Veblen and his siblings were undergraduates. Political economy was a course in the senior year curriculum. I was reading this essay to get a sense of what the word “socialism” would have meant to a well-read, educated American back when Rutherford B. Hayes was President and still eight years before an English translation of the first volume of Marx’s Capital was to appear.  

John Bates Clark was of that founding generation of American academic economists trained-in-Germany, so he was of course completely familiar with, indeed he reflects the German debates of where to draw the line between individualism and socialism in economic affairs and between reform and revolution in political affairs. Here are three teasers from Clark’s essay that follows:

“The intelligent attitude of the social philosopher is, therefore, that of recognizing the general direction which social development is taking, but avoiding that mental confusion which mistakes the socialistic ideal for an object of immediate practical effort. The most intelligent socialist will be the most zealous opponent of what commonly terms itself socialism.”

“…it is only a question of time when the abuses of overgrown corporations controlling legislatures and making or marring the prosperity of cities and even states, at their sovereign pleasure, shall more than counterbalance the abuses which would arise from their assumption and management by the state.”

“The socialistic ideal itself is valuable, not when it is used to incite men to frantic attempts to reach it, but when, by giving definiteness to their intelligent hopes, it is made to lighten the moderate steps by which only they can expect to approach it.”

The historian wants to be on guard against the all-too-easy glib recognition of patterns and sequences shared by past and present. But this is just a blog that is trying (among other things) to build a convenient on-ramp to the past for the those who have had what they believe to be a full and complete scholarly life without having any need to lug baggage of historical material  with them. My point is to have visitors to Economics in the Rear View Mirror read the following essay, not simply to appreciate the humane insights it provides but to read it with the debate (Hope v. Change) between the Democratic presidential contenders of 2016, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in mind. Paul Krugman appears to unleash John-Bates-Clark (implicitly) when he weighs in on Bernie v. Hillary.

________________________

THE NATURE AND PROGRESS OF TRUE SOCIALISM.
John B. Clark

The New Englander and Yale Review, Vol. 38, July, 1879, pp. 565-581.

History has lately been said to move in cycles and epicycles; its phenomena tend to recur, at intervals, in regular succession. An anarchic condition may be followed by despotism, that by democracy, and that, again, by anarchy; yet the second anarchy is not like the first, and when it, in turn, yields to despotism, that also is different from the former despotism. The course of history has been in a circle, but it is a circle whose center is moving. The same phenomena may recur indefinitely; but at each recurrence the whole course of events will have advanced, and the existing condition will be found to have had its parallel, though not its precise duplicate, in some previous condition. There is nothing permanent in history, and there is nothing new. That which is will pass away, and that which will take its place will be like something that has already existed and passed away. History moves, like the earth, in an orbit; but, like the earth, it moves in an orbit the center of which is describing a greater orbit.

That any particular social condition has existed in the past, and has passed away, is no evidence that it will not return, but is rather an evidence that it will return, though in a different form. That socialism existed in the highly developed village-community of the middle ages, and that it existed in a ruder form in antiquity, is, as far as it goes, an evidence that it may appear again, though in a shape adapted to its new surroundings. The earlier cycles of the historic movement are too distant for tracing, and it is impossible to say how many times it may have appeared and disappeared in prehistoric times; but the last cycle may be traced with reasonable distinctness. We have been made familiar, of late, with the village-community of mediaeval times. Beginning at that point, we may trace the economic history of Europe through a series of conditions growing successively less and less socialistic, until we reach the aphelion of the system, the extreme anti-socialistic point, and begin slowly to tend in an opposite direction. I should locate this turning point at a period about a hundred years ago. While Adam Smith was formulating the present system of Political Economy, the world was, in economic matters, at its farthest limit in the direction of individualism, and was about commencing slowly to progress in a socialistic condition.

It is necessary to dissociate from the meaning of the term socialism, as I intend to use it, the signification of lawlessness and violence which is apt to be attached to it. I do not mean by socialism a certain rampant political thing which calls itself by that name, and whose menacing attitude at present is uniting well meaning men against it. The socialism which destroys property and arms itself to resist law is rather socialistic Jacobinism, or communism of the Parisian type. Political socialism, even when moderate and law-abiding, has no right to the exclusive use of the generic term; it is a part only of a very general movement, the signs of which are to be seen in other things than communistic newspapers and Lehr-und Wehr-Vereins.

I mean by socialism, not a doctrine, but a practical movement, tending not to abolish the right of property, but to vest the ownership of it in social organizations, rather than in individuals. The organizations may be private corporations, village-communities, cities, states, or nations, provided only that working men be represented in them. The object of the movement is to secure a distribution of wealth founded on justice, instead of one determined by the actual results of the struggle of competition. Wherever numbers of men unite in the owning of capital, as they already do in the performing of labor, and determine the division of the proceeds by some appeal to a principle of justice, rather than by a general scramble, we have a form of socialism.

The word thus signifies a more highly developed condition of social organization. Within the great organism which we term the state, there are many specific organisms of an industrial character. Such are nearly all our manufactories. These have the marks of high organic development in a minute differentiation of parts; labor is minutely subdivided in these establishments. One man grinds in the ax-factory, and, during his brief lifetime, is not, in economic relations, an independent being, but only a part of the grinding organ of an ax-making creature whose separate atoms are men. All the laborers of the factory, taken collectively, compose an organism which acts as a unit in the making of axes. This ax-making body, however, with its human molecules, is acting in a subordinate capacity—it is hired. As a whole it is serving an employer, and it desires to become independent. The same ambition which prompts the apprentice to leave his master and start in business for himself, is now prompting these organizations of employés to desire a similar promotion. Industrial organisms are seeking what individuals have long been encouraged to seek—emancipation. It is the old struggle for personal independence, translated to a higher plane of organic life.

The modes in which this end is sought are various, and, in so far as the object is realized by any of them, competition is held in abeyance within the organizations, and the division of the product is determined by justice rather than force.

Justice is by no means excluded under the present system. What we term competition is, in practice, subject to such moral limitations that it can be so termed only in a qualified
sense. Moral force, however, now acts only as a restraining influence; it fixes certain limits within which competition is encouraged to operate in determining the distribution of property. Socialism proposes to definitely abandon the competitive principle. If completely realized, as we shall see that it cannot be, it would give to every man, not whatever he might be able to get by force in the industrial arena, but what, in abstract justice, he ought to receive; and moral influence would no longer content itself with prescribing rules, however minute, for the economic gladiators, but would bid them sheath their swords and submit their fortunes to its immediate arbitration. This is ideal socialism, and any actual tendency toward it is practical socialism.

The original force in the movement is moral; mere diversity of interest does not produce permanent social changes. Such diversity of interest always exists where property is to be distributed; but the sense of justice overrules discontent if the distribution is equitable. When a company of thieves are dividing their booty, mere diversity of interest would prompt each one to try to seize the whole of it; but the captain is allowed to divide it into equal shares. The interests of every member of the gang are antagonistic to those of every other; yet there is no outward conflict. In this criminal company the sense of right is sufficiently strong to overrule discontent as long as justice presides over the distribution. Let justice be disregarded, and there will be an uproar. All societies present these phenomena, desires antagonistic, justice as the mediator; it is when the mediation becomes imperfect that social revolutions occur.

If there were not at present something more than a conflict of interest between employers and employed, there would be no thought of reorganizing society. There is such a conflict; but there is behind it a sense of injustice in the distribution of wealth. Singularly enough, there is less disposition to question the existence of the injustice than there is to deny the existence of conflicting interests. We are constantly being told that no intelligent conflict between capitalists and laborers is possible; that their interests are completely identical, and that their normal relation is one of paradisaical harmony. Frequently as this statement is reiterated, the laborers fail to be convinced, and the relation between them and their employers grows, in fact, constantly less paradisaical. There is confusion of thought in prevalent discussions, and the first thing to be done is to analyze the actual relation of capitalists and laborers, and try to remove the confusion.

There is harmony of interest between the two classes in the operation of production; but there is diversity of interest in the operation of distribution. Capitalists and laborers are interested that as much wealth as possible shall be produced, for both are dependent on the product. The mill must be run, or neither owner nor employé can receive anything. When, however, the product is realized, the relation changes; the question is now one of division. The more there is for the owner, the less can go to the men, and here is a source of conflict. The crew of a whaling ship may work with good will until the cargo is brought into port, and then wrangle over their respective shares. They will not go to the length of burning the ship, for they all need it for farther use. Certain limits are thus set to the conflict that arises over the division; but these limits are liable to be broad, and within them the conflict continues.

For clearness of illustration a case has been selected in which production and distribution are separated in time; ordinarily they both go on together, and the relation of employers and employed is, therefore, not an alternation in time from a condition in which their interests harmonize, to one in which they antagonize, but presents a permanent harmony in one respect and a permanent antagonism in another. Both parties are interested in continued and successful production; but in the mere matter of distribution their antagonism of interest is as permanent as their connection. To ignore either side of the relation is unintelligent. If it be incendiary to proclaim only an irrepressible conflict between capital and labor, it is imbecile to reiterate that there is no possible ground of conflict between them, and that actual contests result from ignorance.

While there is no such thing as harmony of interest between participants in any distributing process, there is, fortunately, such a thing as harmony of justice, and if this had been reached or approximated, there would be no need of reforms. It is not merely a sense of unsatisfied want, but a sense of unsatisfied desert, that is prompting men to seek a new mode of distributing wealth.

There are two kinds of distribution, there are good things to be divided when the production is completed, and there are disagreeable things to be shared during the process. After the voyage is over it is oil-barrels that are to be counted and divided, and each man wants as many as possible; during the voyage it is toils and dangers that are to be borne collectively, and each man desires to have as few as possible. In each part of the distributive process there are antagonistic interests which can never be removed, and between which justice only can mediate. Socialism proposes to directly invoke such mediation in both parts of the process; “work according to ability, and compensation according to need,” is the ideal of Louis Blanc. We know that it is an ideal only, and that society cannot reach it; but we ought to know that society may and does tend toward it by many different ways, which, taken collectively, are effecting a sure and healthful reorganization of industrial conditions.

While, at present, the distribution of the product of industry is a more prominent question than the distribution of the labor which secures it, in a completely socialistic condition the reverse would be the case. In a commune the compensation would be the fixed, and the labor the variable element; and here is the chief difficulty of the system. Justice could probably mediate more easily in the distribution of the product than in that of the labor. If pauperism threatens the present system, laziness would threaten an ideally socialistic one. It would be difficult to make men work when their living should no longer depend on it.

The true conception of practical socialism is not that of an ideal scheme, against which this and other objections would be valid, but rather of an actual tendency, showing itself in many specific ways, and working gradually towards an ideal, which unpractical theorists may have grasped and stated, but which would only be put farther out of reach by measures of disorganization and violence. There are socialistic waves on the surface of society; but beneath them there is an undercurrent flowing calmly and resistlessly in the direction of a truer socialism.

Practical socialism is not identical with economic centralization, but it is caused by it. The concentration of industries in a few great establishments produces evils for which practical socialism in some form is the only permanent remedy. Yet these evils may be temporarily alleviated by measures tending to retard this process of concentration. Two classes of remedies for labor troubles are likely to be in operation together, one class resisting and retarding the inevitable growth of centralization, and the other accepting centralization, and rather facilitating it than otherwise, but endeavoring to remove the evils which it occasions. Only the latter are socialistic measures; yet the former need to be considered, not only because they attack similar evils, but because they serve to gain time for the testing of socialistic measures. Haste is the worst enemy of social reform, and whatever gains time for its earlier steps is, therefore, its truest ally.

Of these non-socialistic measures the most important is the prudential and legal restraining of population, advocated by Malthus. So much has been said on this subject that farther discussion is uncalled for here. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the measure. In one way it retards centralization; in another it improves the condition of laborers when centralization has taken place. It will become doubly important as the socialistic tendency proceeds; the absence of such restraints would be fatal to a definitely communistic scheme.

Emigration is next in importance. The great West, as long as it lasts, is the hope of the world, the refuge from economic, as well as from political oppression. Land properly subdivided secures a union of capital and labor, and vests them both in an individual; the diffusion of population tends to individualism. As long as such diffusion is practicable it is preferable to socialism. Small farmers are the best material ever created for the making of orderly and prosperous states. Self-reliant and inseparably committed to the preservation of order, they are the natural enemy of the social agitator—provided, always, they are not too much in debt. Small merchants and artizans are apt to be associated with small farmers, and are next to them in value to a state. Professional men, with limited fields of labor, come in the same category. These are the elements of the ideal New England village, as it existed a hundred years ago, but as it exists no longer in that locality, though its counterpart may be found, in less perfection, at the West. Such a community is the culmination of the principle of individualism, and exhibits its very best results. Long may such communities continue, and far distant be the day when they shall have everywhere yielded to manufacturing and mercantile towns, with their dense population, their poverty, ignorance, and not unnatural discontent. Yet the prospect of such a transformation hangs now like a threatening shadow over the land. Population cannot scatter itself forever. The world is beginning to seem small; emigration from the east and that from the west already meet. The days of diffusion are limited, and those of concentration are at hand.

The present situation has thus its element of discouragement as well as of encouragement; discouraging is the inevitable growth of economic centralization; encouraging is the prospect of removing the evils which that process entails by measures, in a broad sense, socialistics, and of retarding, by other measures, the centralizing process itself. To the broad view the prospect is, on the whole, exceedingly hopeful; but it takes a correct and comprehensive view of the nature of true socialism to make it appear so. The prospect of delaying the concentration of industries is the better from the fact that that process is partly owing to causes within our control; we have hastened it by our own acts. If it be an object to keep our rural communities as long as possible, an effective means of doing so would be to stop making laws, the effect of which is to break them up. Protective tariffs favor manufactures at the expense of agriculture, and therefore hasten centralization. A law of this kind may properly be called “An act to hasten the depopulation of rural villages, to encourage poverty and ignorance, to facilitate the extension of revolutionary ideas, to increase the power of demagogues and to precipitate social tumults.” A moderate free trade policy would have a great many effects not to be discussed here; but one of them would be to prolong the duration of the best forms of individualism.

Such measures, at best, only postpone the great question; they do not settle it, and nothing can settle it except what I have termed, in a broad sense, true socialism. Unknown to social theorists, the way for true socialism has been preparing for a hundred years, and a consideration of these preliminary steps helps to give the true conception of it, as a general development, directed by the Providence which presides over all history.

Among these preliminary changes is the growth of business corporations. These institutions are not beloved by working men, since they are aggregations of capital, but little of which is owned by employés. They mean, to the laborer, an employer without a soul, instead of an employer with one, and they sometimes grind the laborers as few individuals would grind them. Yet the stock company has the capacity easily to become a coöperative institution, and has been its necessary forerunner. It has developed the plan of organization on which coöperative societies may succeed. A slight change in the existing company would make it a coöperative society in complete running order, with its business established and its success assured. Certain foreign experiments in railway management show that the soul need not be entirely wanting in an ordinary corporation, when it is not wanting in its managers; in its present form it may have a rudimentary soul, the presence of which makes a vast difference in the welfare of its laborers. When the corporation shall fairly pass the point in its development where it acquires a fully grown corporate soul, it will become a coöperative society, a beneficent form of true socialism.

Federative governments have paved the way for whatever of political socialism is hopeful and legitimate. The village commune of the middle ages existed at a time when the city or village, and not the individual citizen, was the political unit in the general government. Men were citizens of their towns rather than of their country; and the town, as a whole, was a subject of the king. With the breaking down of city walls and of civic isolation, the citizen became a member of a general society. When the town ceased to be the political unit, it ceased, at the same time, to be the economic unit; it no longer held its lands in common. The partial revival of the federative principle in politics has made it easier to partially restore the socialistic principle in economic matters. There are now cities, states, and nations, each of which acts as an organic unit in many political relations, and the chance of their acting as an organic unit in industry is greatly increased. Enterprises that would be impracticable for a nation may be possible for a state or a city.

We have now to consider institutions that are definitely socialistic. Of these, coöperative societies are first in order, and, thanks to recent experiments and discussions, may be spoken of as something better than visionary schemes. Tried under favorable circumstances, they have become accomplished facts. These circumstances are probably not realized, as yet, over the greater part of this country. The Rochdale association owes its success to conditions not all of which can be found in any part of America. There was a large homogeneous population of manufacturing employés, well organized, and imbued with the teachings of Owen. There was an absence of retail shops that were either good or cheap. There was a universal prevalence of the credit system among dealers; and there was an absence, among them, of that sharp competitive spirit which, in this country, leads merchants to strive to outdo each other in reducing prices to a minimum. The association, therefore, had exceptionally good material in its members and its managers, and had an unusual field for securing custom by the virtual reduction of prices which it was able to offer to its patrons. The absence of these advantages, at present, in this country proves, not that coöperation has no legitimate home here, but rather the opposite; it shows that too sweeping conclusions against the measure should not be drawn from past failures. These failures are accounted for, and their causes are not permanent. The requisite conditions are likely to be realized in the future, and with them will come a higher degree of success for the new principle than we have seen here as yet. That success is to be regarded as assured already, on better evidence than the result of any particular experiment, namely, the general course of events, of which such an experiment is one of many indications, an eddy, that tells the direction of the undercurrent.

The Rochdale store has been called an experiment in “coöperative distribution,” in distinction from manufacturing enterprises, which have been classed as “coöperative production;” an unscientific use of terms, since mercantile industry is productive, like any other. This store represents a peculiar kind of coöperative production. Mr. Mill has pointed out that it is not completely coöperative, in that the managers, clerks, porters, &c., are not paid by shares in the profits, and has suggested that to give them such shares would make the experiment complete. Yet these employés are few in number in proportion to the shareholders and customers, who are the real parties in the experiment. Coöperative stores organized by working men in manufacturing villages are of the nature of mixed coöperation. The essential particularity about them is that men who are employés in one industry become proprietors in another. There is a union of capital and labor in the same hands, but not in the same industry; while the labor of the men is engaged in one enterprise, they accumulate capital and employ it in another. While, therefore, such experiments may greatly benefit the working men, they cannot remove the cause of conflict between them and their employers in their own original industry. The store may help the mill operatives to cheap goods, but their relation to the owner of the mill remains unaltered. The same is true of all experiments in mixed coöperation; they are beneficent undertakings, but do not remove the root of the evil.

On a par with mixed coöperation is that partial coöperation in which laborers do not own capital, but are paid by a share of profits, instead of by wages. Mr. Mill’s illustrations of this system, taken from the workshops of Paris, are sufficiently familiar; but an illustration nearer at hand and brilliantly successful is offered by the New Bedford whale fishery. The crews of whaling vessels were regularly paid by a share of the cargo, and the hearty good will which they showed, in a kind of work in which superintendence by the owner was impossible, proves the efficiency of this measure in intensifying the harmony of interest and of feeling which should exist between employers and employed, as far as production is concerned. This plan does not, in theory, remove the conflict of interest which exists in reference to distribution; it is still possible to wrangle over the size of the shares. The seamen who received each a two-hundredth part of the cargo might strike for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth. Strikes did not, in fact, occur, because custom had determined what appeared to be the rightful share of each person, and they all submitted to such arbitration.

The share system, if generally introduced, would work to the advantage of the laboring class in times of prosperity, and to their disadvantage in times of depression. Under unsettled conditions neither employers nor employed are likely to favor the plan; the employers, because they do not wish to sacrifice the chance of becoming rapidly rich in prosperous periods; and the workmen, because they do not wish to run the risk of receiving less than they now do in times of adversity. Under settled conditions the plan might be expected to work to the advantage of both parties. A minimum would doubtless be determined upon below which the shares of the laborers should not be allowed to fall. With the general prevalence of more settled conditions in industry the adoption of the share system becomes more probable.

Coöperation is complete only when laborers own the capital which is employed in the industry in which they are engaged. Here the conflict of interest between capital and labor is reduced to a minimum, and justice has the freest scope in determining the distribution of the product. This most desirable form of coöperation is the most difficult. In a small way it is in operation where a number of partners in a shop do all the work. Where small industries prevail, however, there is little need of coöperative experiments. In the departments of transportation and of manufactures concentration is most rapid and most merciless to the laborer, and while the evils of railroad monopolies are more likely to be remedied by state action, those arising from overgrown manufacturing enterprises call urgently for private coöperation. The difficulties are in proportion to the desirability of the end, arising from the amount and character of the capital required, the complicated nature of the process, and the fierce competition to be sustained. These difficulties account for past failures in this direction, and deprive them of their weight as arguments against the ultimate prevalence of the system. Difficulties will be surmounted, if the principle of the system is right and is in the general line of economic progress.

Complete coöperation has succeeded on the largest scale in agriculture. The economic motive for this mode of living is less urgent in this department of industry than in others; but success is easier, and in the chief experiment of the kind, a religious motive has supplemented the economic. The Shakers, the Amana communists, the Perfectionists and others have been united by other than economic bonds, and the success of their experiments is not only nor chiefly in proving that agricultural socialism is possible, but in showing that this mode of living is favorable, as it seems to have been in Jerusalem of old, to religious brotherhood among men. Indeed the bit of communistic history furnished by the book of Acts appears to have, as one object at least, to refute the arguments of those who claim that socialism is not merely impracticable, but ultimately and forever undesirable, and who can see only evil in the successive steps of society in that direction. The early Christian commune was a success religiously, if not otherwise; and if modern communes can be made successful economically and religiously, if, while removing evils purely economic, they also ally themselves with the spirit of religious fraternity, then their growth will be as sure, though possibly as slow, as the growth of the fraternal spirit among men.

Public industry is the most general form of socialism, and it is here that its political battles are to be fought. Political socialism demands that the government shall own the capital of the country, and that the proceeds of its use shall be divided according to principles of abstract justice. There is no harm in this as an ideal, but there is ruin in it as an immediate practical aim. It is not only best that we should tend-toward this ideal, but it is inevitable that we should do so; yet it is insane to try to reach it at once. Here is the dividing line between the false political socialism and the true; the one sees an ideal, and would force humanity to it through blood and fire; the other sees the ideal, and reverently studies and follows the course by which Providence is leading us toward it.

The intelligent attitude of the social philosopher is, therefore, that of recognizing the general direction which social development is taking, but avoiding that mental confusion which mistakes the socialistic ideal for an object of immediate practical effort. The most intelligent socialist will be the most zealous opponent of what commonly terms itself socialism. Facts sustain this inference; the German government, in its practical workings, is strongly socialistic; and yet it suppresses pronounced socialism by arbitrary methods; and there is no inconsistency in this. That Germany, by regular means, is becoming markedly socialistic, is a reason for resisting attempts to precipitate, and thus completely thwart the beneficial movement. Were theoretical socialism to be inaugurated in practice, practical socialism would be put backward a hundred years.

German governments own railroads, telegraph lines, forests, and mines; they conduct manufactures, maintain parcel posts, and do much of the banking business of the country. The functions of government the world over are increasing with all reasonable rapidity. While, therefore, socialistic Jacobinism may seek to destroy a government in order to precipitate its visionary schemes, intelligent socialism will uphold it and await the general growth of the movement with such contentment as it may.

The increase of the economic functions of the government is regarded, in this country, with apprehension, not so much because it is in itself undesirable, as on account of the practical difficulties to be surmounted before it can be safely accomplished. Given an untrustworthy government, and the less you commit to it the better, is a summary of the prevalent argument. It is not singular that immigrants from a country where the government, if oppressive, is honest and efficient, should be less conscious of the practical difficulties, and more impatient to secure the result in view, and that, from such material, a pronounced socialistic party should be organized. If the condition of our civil service is unfavorable to the adoption of the measures of political socialism, the federative character of our government is favorable to it. Cities, states, and the nation as a whole, may, at sometime, find themselves performing functions which, in the aggregate, equal those of the German government. We are crowded in this direction by a powerful vis a tergo, the increasing abuses of economic centralization, and it is only a question of time when the abuses of overgrown corporations controlling legislatures and making or marring the prosperity of cities and even states, at their sovereign pleasure, shall more than counterbalance the abuses which would arise from their assumption and management by the state.

One socialistic measure has attracted little attention in proportion to its importance, namely, prison industry. The employment of prisoners in industries conducted directly by the state government itself, is, perhaps, the most practicable and the most unquestionably beneficial of any of the measures of this nature. The socialistic ideal is realized in a great prison conducted in this manner; there is “labor applied to public resources,” and there is strict equity in the division of the profits. In such institutions all the profits, and more, go to the laborers. The system of letting prison labor, under contract, to private employers, neutralizes the benefits to be derived from this legitimate form of socialism, and is contrary alike to the principles of Political Economy and to those of morality.

Public work-houses for tramps would be an extension of the system, and would have the incalculable advantage of dissociating the tramp question from the general labor question. Such a measure ought to be highly satisfactory to most of the parties concerned; to the government, because its burden of watchfulness would be lessened; to the citizen, because he would be made more secure; and to the well meaning political socialist, because his party would be well rid of its most dangerous element. It would probably not be equally satisfactory to the reckless and criminal hangers-on in the socialist party; though, in consistency, it ought to be so, since it might have the effect of placing them in a commune under government auspices, the operation of which would be more regular and successful than that of any which they could hope of themselves to establish. The proposal of such a measure would test the honesty of declared political socialists; if well meaning they would advocate it; if desirous of confusion and plunder, they would oppose it.

If breadth of view is necessary anywhere, it is so in discussing the general socialistic tendency of modern life. No limiting of the vision to particular phases of the question is to be admitted. A narrow view sees the menacing attitude of socialistic Jacobinism, and steels itself to resist anything that calls itself by the dangerous name; a broader view will distinguish true socialism from false, and see that the best protection against the false is the natural progress of the true. Present institutions contain in themselves the germs of a progress that shall ultimately break the limitations of the existing system, and give us the only socialism that can be permanent or beneficial. In many ways capital is vesting itself in social organizations, instead of in individuals. Labor is organizing itself, private coöperation is increasing, and governments of every kind are assuming new economic functions. The true socialism is progressing, and the best way to make it progress more rapidly is to enact sufficient laws for the suppression of the false.

Socialism, in the broad sense, meets an imperative human want, and must grow surely, though not, as reformers are wont to estimate progress, rapidly. The prime condition of success in its growth is slowness; haste means all manner of violence and wrong. Only step by step can we hope to approach the social ideal which is beginning to reveal itself; impatience would place us farther away than ever.

The condition of permanence in socialistic changes is mental and moral progress. The permanence of republics has long been known to depend on these conditions; they are short-lived where the people are ignorant or bad. True socialism is economic republicanism, and it can come no sooner, stay no longer, and rise, in quality, no higher than intelligence and virtue among the people.

The beauty of the socialistic ideal is enough to captivate the intellect that fairly grasps it. It bursts on the view like an Italian landscape from the summit of an Alpine pass, and lures one down the dangerous declivity. Individualism appears to say, “Here is the world; take, every one, what you can get of it. Not too violently, not altogether unjustly, but, with this limitation, selfishly, let every man make his possessions as large as he may. For the strong there is much, and for his children more; for the weak there is little, and for his children less.”

True socialism appears to say, “Here is the world; take it as a family domain under a common father’s direction. Enjoy it as children, each according to his needs; labor as brethren, each according to his strength. Let justice supplant might in the distribution, so that, when there is abundance, all may participate, and when there is scarcity, all may share in the self-denial. If there is loss of independence, there will be gain of interdependence; he who thinks less for himself will think more for his brother. If there is loss of brute force gained in the rude struggle of competition, there is gain of moral power, acquired by the interchange of kindly offices.[“] The beautiful bond which scientists call altruism, but which the Bible terms by a better name, will bind the human family together as no other tie can bind them.

Sufferers under an actual system naturally look for deliverance and for a deliverer. The impression has prevailed among working men that a new device of some kind might free them from their difficulties. Ideal socialism seems to meet this expectation, and those who preach it as an immediate practical aim naturally receive a hearing. The way in which the old system is defended is often as repulsive as the new teaching is attractive. When one teacher bids the poor submit, and another bids them hope, they will not be long in choosing between them. Yet there is no royal road to general comfort. There is much to be gained by reverently studying the course of Providence, but comparatively little by inventing new schemes of society. The new dispensation is not coming with observation, and it has no particular apostles. The socialistic ideal itself is valuable, not when it is used to incite men to frantic attempts to reach it, but when, by giving definiteness to their intelligent hopes, it is made to lighten the moderate steps by which only they can expect to approach it.

Image Source: Amherst Yearbook Olio ’96 (New York, 1894), pp. 7-9. Picture above from frontispiece.

Categories
Columbia Courses Curriculum

Columbia. Report of the Dean of the School of Political Science, 1901

I reproduce here the report of the Dean of the School of Political Science at Columbia University for the academic year 1900-01 in its entirety so we have a fairly complete accounting of the graduate education activities of the entire administrative unit within which the Columbia economics department was embedded at the start of the twentieth century. The document provides enormous detail from course registration totals through seminar participants by name and presentations through the work of those on fellowships and finally to the job placements of its graduates. The structure of the report can be seen below from the links to its individual sections:

Course Registration Data
Seminar in European History
Seminar in American Colonial History
Seminar in American History
Seminar in Modern European History
Seminar in Political Philosophy
Seminar in Constitutional Law
Seminar in Diplomacy and International Law
Seminar in Political Economy
Seminar in Political Economy and Finance
Seminar in Economic Theory
Statistical Laboratory and Seminar
Seminar in Sociology
Work of Fellows
Publications under the Supervision of the Faculty
Educational Appointments
Governmental Appointments
Other Appointments

_______________________________________

[p. 114]

 

SCHOOL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

REPORT OF THE DEAN
FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR ENDING JUNE 30, 1901

To the President of Columbia University in the City of New York:

SIR:

I have the honor to submit the following report of the work of the Faculty of Political Science for the scholastic year 1900-1901. During the year 268 students have taken courses of instruction under the Faculty of Political Science, of whom 18 were women. Of these 68 students were also registered in the Law School, and 13 in the Schools of Philosophy, Pure Science, and Applied Science.

In the Report of the Registrar will be found tabular statements of the courses of study offered in the School, together with the attendance upon each, as follows:

Group I—History and Political Philosophy [page 270,  page 271]

A. European History. pages 270-271
B. American History, pages 270-271
C. Political Philosophy, pages 270-271

1900_01_HistPolPhilRegistrations1

1900_01_HistPolPhilRegistrations2

Group II—Public Law and Comparative Jurisprudence [page 291]

A. Constitutional Law, page 291
B. International Law, page 291
C. Administrative Law, page 291
D. Roman Law and Comparative Jurisprudence, page 291

1900_01_PublicLawRegistrations

Group III—Economics and Social Science [page 264]

A. Political Economy and Finance, page 264
B. Sociology and Statistics, page 264

1900_01_EconomicsRegistrations

[p. 115]

WORK IN THE SEMINARS

Seminar in European History

Professor Robinson. 2 hours fortnightly. 6 members.

The topic treated was the Development of the Papal Primacy to Gregory VII. Each student gave two or more reports on the various phases of the subject, dealing chiefly with the sources.

 

Seminar in American Colonial History

Professor Osgood. 2 hours a week. 27 members.

This course has been conducted as a lecture course and seminar combined. A paper was presented by each of the students and was discussed in the seminar. Among the subjects treated in these papers were:

Royal Charters and Governors’ Commissions;
Royal Instructions to Governors;
Salaries of Governors;
Agrarian Riots in New Jersey from 1745 to 1790;
Pirates and Piracy;
Paper Money in the Colonies;
Career of Robert Livingston;
Relations between the Executive in New York and the English Government;
Policy of the British Government toward the Charter Colonies subsequent to 1690.

A number of papers, also, were presented on subjects connected with Colonial defence.

 

Seminar in American History

Professor Osgood. 1 hour a week. 6 members.

In connection with the work of this Seminar the following Master’s theses have been prepared, read, and discussed:

System of Defence in Early Colonial Massachusetts, Sidney D. Brummer.
The Administration of George Clark in New York, 1736 to 1743, Walter H. Nichols.
The Relation of the Iroquois to the Struggle between the French and English in North America, Walter D. Gerken.

[p. 116]

Relations between France and England in North America from 1690 to 1713, Samuel E. Moffett.
France and England in America from 1713 to 1748, Henry R. Spencer.
Conflict between the French and English in North America, Walter L. Fleming.

 

Seminar in Modern European History

Professor Sloane. 6 members.

The following are the subjects which were discussed and upon which papers have been presented:

The Treaty of Basel, Guy S. Ford.
Hanover in the Revolutionary Epoch, Guy S. Ford.
The 18th Brumaire, Charles W. Spencer.
Beginnings of Administration under the Consulate, Charles W. Spencer.
Origins of the Continental System, Ulrich B. Phillips.
Development of the Continental System, Ulrich B. Phillips.
Napoleon and the Caulaincourt Correspondence, Ellen S. Davison.
Caulaincourt in Russia, Ellen S. Davison.
Custine in Metz, Walter P. Bordwell.
Hardenberg and Haugwitz, Paul Abelson.

 

Seminar in Political Philosophy

Professor Dunning. 1 hour a week. 1 member.

William O. Easton presented an elaborate paper on the Political Theories of Spinoza with Reference to the Theory of Hobbes.

 

Seminar in Constitutional Law

Professor Burgess. 1 hour a week. 27 members.

The work in this Seminar during the present year has been the study of the cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving private rights and immunities under the protection of the Constitution of the United States. Each member of the Seminar has prepared an essay upon the cases relating to a given point under this

[p. 117]

general subject, and has read the same before the Seminar, where it has been subjected to general comment and criticism.

 

Seminar in Diplomacy and International Law

Professor Moore. 2 hours a week. 12 members.

Papers were read as follows:

Decisions of the Courts in the United States on Questions Growing out of the Annexation of Territory, William H. Adams.
The Southwestern Boundary of the United States, James F. Barnett.
The Development of the Laws of War Walter P. Bordwell.
Treaties: Their Making, Construction, and Enforcement, Samuel D. Crandall.
The Diplomacy of the Second Empire, Stephen P. Duggan.
Blockades, Sydney H. Herman.
Diplomatic Officers, William C. B. Kemp.

 

Seminar in Political Economy

Professor Mayo-Smith. 1 hour a week. 9 members.

In addition to reading and discussing Marshall’s Principles of Economics, in which all the members of the Seminar participated, papers were read upon the following subjects:

Trusts in the United States Hajime Hoshi.
Trusts and Prices, Robert B. Olsen.
The Industrial Employment of Women, Charles M. Niezer.

 

Seminar in Political Economy and Finance

Professor Seligman. 2 hours fortnightly. 20 members.

The subject of work in this Seminar during the first term was “The Foundations of Economic Philosophy.” During the second term a variety of subjects was discussed. Each member of the Seminar also made a report at each meeting on current periodical literature in economics, including the literature of the following countries: United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. The papers read were as follows:

[p. 118]

Natural Law and Economics, Robert P. Shepherd.
The Economic Motive, Holland Thompson.
The Law of Competition, Walter E. Clark.
The Theory of Individualism, Enoch M. Banks.
Social Element in the Theory of Value, John W. Dickman.
Theory of Insurance, Allan H. Willett.
Theory of Monopolies, Alvin S. Johnson.
Economic Doctrine of Senior, Albert C. Whitaker.
Bounties and Shipping Subsidies, Royal Meeker.
Legal Decisions on the Labor Question, Ernest A. Cardozo.
Commercial Policy of Japan, Yetaro Kinosita.
Early American Economic Theory, Albert Britt.
The Movement toward Consolidation, Robert B. Oken.

 

Seminar in Economic Theory

Professor Clark. 2 hours fortnightly. 12 members.

Papers were presented on the following subjects:

Labor as a Measure of Value, Albert C. Whitaker.
Value Theories of Say and Ricardo, Robert P. Shepherd.
Rent and Value, Alvin S. Johnson.
Monetary Theories, John W. Dickman.
The Influence of Insurance on Distribution, Allan H. Willett.
Early Socialism, Enoch M. Banks.
Louis Blanc, Royal Meeker.
Fabian Socialism, Albert Britt.
Commercial Crises, Ernest A. Cardozo.
Speculation, Yetaro Kinosita.
Labor Unions in North Carolina, Holland Thompson.
Welfare Institutions, Walter E. Clark.

 

Statistical Laboratory and Seminar

Professor Mayo-Smith. 2 hours fortnightly. 5 members.

The work of the year was devoted to developing the mathematical theory of statistics with practical exercises.

 

Seminar in Sociology

Professor Giddings. 2 hours fortnightly. 12 members.

The following papers were read and discussed.

Types of Mind and Character in Colonial Massachusetts, Edward W. Capen.

[p. 119]

Types of Mind and Character in Colonial Connecticut, William F. Clark.
Types of Mind and Character in Colonial New York, George M. Fowles.
Types of Mind and Character in Colonial Pennsylvania, Andrew L. Horst.
Types of Mind and Character in Colonial Virginia, Robert L. Irving.
Types of Mind and Character in the Early Days of North Carolina,Thomas J. Jones.
Types of Mind and Character in the Early Days of Kentucky, Edwin A. McAlpinJr.
Types of Mind and Character in the Early Days of Indiana, Daniel L. Peacock.
Types of Mind and Character in the Early Days of Wisconsin, Albert G. Mohr.
An Analysis of the Mental Characteristics of the Population of an East-Side New York City Block, Thomas J. Jones.
A Statistical Study of the Response to Lincoln’s First Call for Volunteers, Andrew L. Horst.
The Charities of Five Presbyterian Churches in Harlem, Robert L. Irving.
The Poor Laws of Connecticut, Edward W. Capen.
Parochial Settlement in England, Bertha H. Putnam.
A Critical and Statistical Study of Male and Female Birth Rate,s Daniel L. Peacock.

 

WORK OF FELLOWS

During the year the following persons have held Fellowships in subjects falling under the jurisdiction of this Faculty:

1. William Maitland Abell, Political Science.

Yale University, A.B., 1887; A.M., 1898.,New York University, LL.M., 1894. Columbia University, graduate student, 1898-1901; Fellow in Political Science, 1899-1900.

Mr. Abell, Honorary Fellow, continued his work in the Seminar in Constitutional Law, and made excellent progress in the preparation of his Doctor’s dissertation.

[p. 120]

2. Walter Percy Bordwell, International Law.

University of California, B.L., 1898. Columbia University, graduate student, 1898-1901.

Mr. Bordwell, the holder of the Schiff Fellowship, worked under the direction of Professor Moore upon his Doctor’s dissertation: “The Development of the Laws of War since the Time of Grotius.” He also took part in the Seminars of Professors Moore and Sloane, presenting a paper in each of these Seminars. He passed, in May, his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

3. James Wilford Garner, Political Science.

Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, B.S., 1892. University of Chicago, graduate student, 1896-99; Instructor in Bradley Polytechnic Institute, Peoria, Ill., 1899-1900. Columbia University, graduate student, 1900-01.

Mr. Garner worked under the direction of Professor Dunning in American Political Philosophy. Professor Dunning reports that his “Study of the Tendencies Manifested in the Amendments of State Constitutions from 1830-1860” is a noteworthy contribution to science. He also attended the Seminar in Constitutional Law and worked there upon the cases decided by the Supreme Court in the interpretation of private rights under the Constitution of the United States.

4. Alvin Saunders Johnson, Economics.

University of Nebraska, A.B., 1897; A.M., 1898. Columbia University, graduate student, 1899-1901; Scholar in Political Economy, 1899-1900.

Mr. Johnson read a paper in Professor Seligman’s Seminar on “The Theory of Monopolies.” He worked also in Professor Clark’s Seminar, and, in consultation with Professor Clark, upon the preparation of his Doctor’s dissertation, “The Classical Theory of Rent.” He passed, in May, his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

5. Thomas Jesse Jones, Sociology.

Marietta College, A.B., 1897. Student at Union Theological Seminary, 1897-1900. Columbia University, A.M., 1899; graduate student, 1897-1901.

Mr. Jones worked under the direction of Professor Giddings upon his Doctor’s dissertation, “A Sociological Study of the Population of a New York City Block.” Professor Giddings reports that this dissertation promises to be one of the most minute investigations of modern city life yet undertaken. Mr. Jones also made the annual revision of the list and description of social settlements in New York City which is regularly expected of a Fellow in Sociology. He passed, in May, his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

[p. 121]

6. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, History.

University of Georgia, A.B., 1897; A.M., 1898. Tutor in History, 1899-1900. Columbia University, graduate student, 1900-01.

Mr. Phillips worked under the direction of Professor Dunning upon a “Study of the Political History of Georgia,” in connection with which he planned to make researches during the summer in the historical collections at Savannah, Atlanta, and other points in the State. Mr. Phillips also presented several papers on various phases of American Political Philosophy in connection with the course on that subject. He also worked in the Seminars of Professors Sloane and Robinson and presented reports in each.

 

7. Jesse Eliphalet Pope, Economics.

University of Minnesota, B.S., 1895; M.S., 1897. Columbia University, graduate student, 1897-1901: Fellow in Economics, 1898-1900.

Mr. Pope, Honorary Fellow, worked in Seminar with Professor Seligman, but took a less active part than he desired, owing to his having obtained a professorship in Economics at New York University. He had, however, passed his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree in May, 1900, and was busy through the winter in preparing his Doctor’s dissertation.

 

8. Charles Worthen Spencer, American History.

Colby University, A.B., 1890. Chicago University, Fellow in Political Science, 1892-94. Columbia University, graduate student, 1894-95, 1900-01. Colgate University, Professor of History, 1895-1900.

Mr. Spencer worked under the direction of Professor Osgood upon the preparation of his Doctor’s dissertation, the subject of which is “New York as a Royal Province, 1690-1730.” He also read two papers in Professor Sloane’s Seminar, and participated generally in the work of this Seminar. He passed, in May, his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

9. Earl Evelyn Sperry, European History.

Syracuse University, Ph.B., 1898; Ph.M., 1899. Columbia University, Scholar in History, 1899-1900; graduate student, 1899-1901.

Mr. Sperry worked under the direction of Professor Robinson, and besides preparing several reports for the Seminar in European History, completed the first draft of his Doctor’s dissertation upon ” The Celibacy of the Clergy in the Mediaeval Church.” He also passed, in May, the oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

[p. 122]

11. Albert Concer Whitaker, Economics.

Stanford University, A.B., 1899. Columbia University, Scholar in Economics, 1899-1900; graduate student, 1890-1901.

Mr. Whitaker worked in Seminar with Professor Seligman and also with Professor Clark. He made considerable progress in the preparation of his Doctor’s dissertation upon “The Entrepreneur,” and passed, in June, his oral examinations for the Doctor’s degree.

 

PUBLICATIONS UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF THE FACULTY

Of the Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, under the editorial management of Professor Seligman, there have appeared during the year six numbers.

Vol. XIII.

No. 1. The Legal Property Relations of Married Parties. By Professor Isidor Loeb.
No. 2. Political Nativism in New York State. By Louis Dow Scisco.
No. 3. Reconstruction of Georgia. By Edwin C. Woolley.

Vol. XIV.

No. 1. Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution. By Prof. Alexander C. Flick.
No. 2. Economic Theory of Risk and Insurance. By Allan H. Willett.

Vol. XV.

No. 1. Civilization and Crime. By Arthur Cleveland Hall.

The sale of these monographs and volumes has increased considerably during the past few years and some of the early volumes are now out of print. The foreign demand has also developed to such an extent that arrangements have now been made with agents, both in London and Paris, for placing them upon the European market.

The Political Science Quarterly has continued to prosper. With the close of the year 1900 it completed its fifteenth annual volume. In order to make available for students the great mass of scientific matter contained in these fifteen volumes, a general index has been prepared, to be published in a separate volume. This index will appear during the summer.

[p. 123]

Two very successful public meetings of the Academy were held during the winter. The first was addressed by Professor Goodnow, who had served as a member of the Commission to Revise the Charter of New York City. Professor Goodnow presented a careful analysis of the report and recommendations of the Commission. The second meeting was devoted to a discussion of Trusts by Professor J. W. Jenks, who gave the chief results of the investigations made by him on behalf of the Industrial Commission.

The History Club has about thirty members, and, with invited guests, an average attendance of about fifty persons. During the year it has held eight meetings, of which three were conducted solely by the students. At the other meetings papers were read by James Ford Rhodes, Frederic Harrison, Professor Robinson, and Professor George B. Adams.

I reported in 1899 that a number of former students of the School of Political Science had obtained positions either as teachers or in the administrative service of New York State. I have the pleasure now to report that during the past two years a much larger number have obtained first appointments, or have been advanced to better positions, not only as teachers and as state officers, but also in the Federal Civil Service. The lists appended are probably incomplete, but they will serve to show the widening influence of the School. The dates immediately following each name indicate the period of residence in the School.

 

I.—EDUCATIONAL APPOINTMENTS

Carl L. Becker, 1898-99, Univ. Fellow, 1898-99,
Instructor in Political Science and History, Pennsylvania State College.

Ernest L. Bogart, 1897-98,
Associate Professor of Economics and Sociology, Oberlin College, Ohio.

Lester G. Bugbee, 1893-95, Univ. Fellow, 1893-95,
Adjunct Professor of History, University of Texas.

William M. Burke, 1897-99, Univ. Fellow, 1897-99; Ph.D., 1899,
Professor of History and Economics, Albion College, Michigan.

[p. 124]

Charles E. Chadsey, 1893-94, Univ. Fellow, 1893-94; Ph. D., 1897,
Lecturer on History, University of Colorado.

Walter E. Clark, 1899-1901,
Tutor in Political Economy, College of the City of New York.

Walter W. Cook, 1898-1900, A.M., 1899,
Instructor in Constitutional and Administrative Law in the University of Nebraska.

Harry A. Cushing, 1893-95, Univ. Fellow, 1894-95; Ph.D., 1896,
Lecturer on History and Constitutional Law, Columbia University.

Ellen S. Davison, 1899-1901, Cand. Ph.D.,
Lecturer on History, Barnard College.

Alfred L. P. Dennis, 1896-99, Ph.D., 1901,
Assistant in History, 1900-01, Harvard University; Instructor in History, Bowdoin College.

Stephen P. H. Duggan, 1896-1900, A.M., 1899; Cand. Ph.D.,
Instructor in Political Science, College of the City of New York.

Charles F. Emerick, 1896-97, University Fellow, 1896-97; Ph.D., 1897,
Professor of Political Economy, Smith College, Mass.

Henry C. Emery, 1893-94, University Fellow, 1893-94; Ph.D., 1896,
Professor of Political Economy, Yale University.

John A. Fairlie, 1897-98, University Fellow, 1897-98; Ph.D., 1898,
Assistant Professor of Administrative Law, University of Michigan.

Guy S. Ford, 1900-01, Cand. Ph.D.,
Instructor of History, Yale University.

Delmer E. Hawkins, 1899-1900,
Instructor in Political Economy, Syracuse University.

Allen Johnson, 1897-98, University Fellow, 1897-98; Ph.D., 1899,
Professor of History, Iowa College, Grinnell ; also Lecturer on European History in the University of Wisconsin, Summer Session, 1901.

Alvin S. Johnson, 1898-1901, University Fellow, 1900-01; Cand. Ph.D.,
Assistant in Economics, Bryn Mawr College.

Lindley M. Keasby, 1888-90, Ph.D., 1890,
Professor of Economics and Social Science, Bryn Mawr College.

James A. McLean, 1892-94, University Fellow, 1892-94; Ph.D., 1894,
Professor of History and Political Science, University of Idaho.

Milo R. Maltbie, 1895-97, University Fellow, 1895-96; Ph.D., 1897,
Lecturer on Municipal Government, Columbia University.

Charles E. Merriam, Jr., 1896-98, Fellow, 1897-98; Ph.D., 1900,
Docent in Political Science, University of Chicago.

Walter H. Nichols, 1899-1901, Cand. Ph.D.,
Professor of History, University of Colorado.

Comadore E. Prevey, 1898-1900, University Fellow, 1898-1900; A.M., 1899; Cand. Ph.D.,
Lecturer on Sociology, University of Nebraska.

Jesse E. Pope, 1897-1900, University Fellow, 1898-1900; Cand. Ph.D.,
Adjunct Professor of Political Economy, 1900-01, New York University; Professor of Political Economy, University of Missouri.

[p. 125]

Charles L. Raper, 1898-1900, University Fellow, 1899-1900; Cand. Ph.D..
Lecturer on History, Barnard College, 1900-01; Assistant Professor of Economics and History, University of North Carolina.

William A. Rawles, 1898-99, Cand. Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor of Economics and Sociology, University of Indiana.

William A. Schaper, 1896-98, University Fellow, 1897-98; Ph.D., 1901,
Professor of Administration, University of Minnesota.

Louis D. Scisco, 1899-1900, Ph.D., 1901,
Teacher of History, High School, Stillwater, Minnesota.

William R. Shepherd, 1893-95, University Fellow, 1893-95; Ph.D.. 1896,
Tutor in History, Columbia University.

James T. Shotwell, 1898-1900, University Fellow, 1899-1900; Cand. Ph.D.,
Assistant in History, Columbia University.

William R. Smith, 1898-1900, University Fellow, 1898-1900; Cand. Ph.D.,
Instructor in History, University of Colorado.

Edwin P. Tanner, 1897-1900, A.M., 1898; University Fellow, 1899-1900; Cand. Ph.D.,
Teacher of History, High School, Stillwater, Minnesota.

Holland Thompson, 1899-1901, University Fellow, 1899-1900; A.M., 1900,
Tutor in History, College of the City of New York.

Francis Walker, 1892-94, University Fellow, 1892-94; Ph.D., 1895,
Associate Professor of Political Economy, Adelbert College, Western Reserve University.

Ulysses G. Weatherby, 1899-1900,
Professor of Economics and Social Science, University of Indiana.

 

2.—GOVERNMENTAL APPOINTMENTS

Frank G. Bates, 1896-97, Ph.D., 1899,
State Librarian, Providence, R. I.

John F. Crowell, 1894-95, University Fellow, 1894-95; Ph.D.. 1897,
Expert Agent on Agricultural Products, Industrial Commission.

John H. Dynes, 1896-98, A.M., 1897; University Fellow, 1897-98,
Student Clerk, Division of Methods and Results, Twelfth Census.

Charles E. Edgerton, 1898-99,
Special Agent, Industrial Commission.

Frederick S. Hall, 1896-97, Ph.D., 1898,
Clerk, Division of Manufactures, Twelfth Census.

Leonard W. Hatch, 1894-95,
Statistician, Bureau of Labor, Albany, New York.

Isaac A. Hourwich, 1891-92, Ph.D., 1893,
Translator, Bureau of the Mint, Washington, D. C.

Maurice L. Jacobson, 1892-95,
Librarian, Bureau of Statistics, Treasury Department, Washington, D. C.

William Z. Ripley, 1891-93, University Fellow, 1891-93; Ph.D., 1893,
Expert on Transportation, Industrial Commission.

Frederick W. Sanders, 1895-96,
Director, Agricultural Experiment Station, New Mexico.

Nahum I. Stone, 1897-99,
Expert on Speculation and Prices, Industrial Commission, Washington, D. C.

[p. 126]

Adna F. Weber, 1896-97, University Fellow, 1896-97; Ph.D., 1899,
Chief Statistician, Bureau of Labor, Albany. N. Y.

Walter F. Willcox, 1886-88, Ph.D., 1891,
Chief Statistician, Census Office, Washington, D. C.

 

Dr. Max West, 1891-93; University Fellow, 1892-93; Ph.D., 1893, should figure in both of the preceding lists; for he has been appointed Chief Clerk in the Division of Statistics, Department of Agriculture, and has also become Associate Professor of Economics in the Columbian University, Washington, D. C.

The direction of organized charity is a field of labor for which our students in Sociology receive an excellent training; and I am glad to report that Mr. Prevey, whose appointment as lecturer in the University of Nebraska is noted above, has also been made General Secretary of the local Charity Organization Society. I have also to report that Mr. Thomas J. Jones, a student in the School during the past four years and Fellow in Sociology, 1900-01, has been appointed Assistant Head Worker in the University Settlement, New York City.

“To give an adequate economic and legal training to those who intend to make journalism their profession” has always been announced as one of the objects of the School of Political Science; and a considerable number of our graduates have become editors. It is more difficult, however, to keep track of journalists than of teachers and governmental officers, and the only recent appointment in this field of which I have been informed is that of Dr. Roeliff M. Breckenridge, Ph.D., 1894, as financial editor of the New York Journal of Commerce.

 

Respectfully submitted,

John W. Burgess,

Dean.

June 10, 1901.

 

Source: Twelfth Annual Report of President Low to the Trustees. October 7, 1901.