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Oxford. Exams for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), 1931

During the winter of 1931-32 Wesley Clair Mitchell of Columbia University taught as Eastman Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. In Mitchell’s papers in the Columbia University archives is a complete collection of the examinations for the Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Trinity term 1931 provided him by his  Oxford colleague Robert Hall. I have even transcribed the French/German/Italian texts for the “Unseen translation paper” (at least two of the three languages). Would be interested to know how a Google translation would have scored. I am following the ordering of the exams found in the Mitchell papers, reflecting Hall’s grouping of the examinations  (III, IV, VIII, IX required political economy topics; VII choice of one of three further topics in political economy; I, II, X, V, VI all the non-political-economy topics)

 

  1. HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
  2. BRITISH CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY
  3. POLITICAL ECONOMY
  4. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
  5. PRESCRIBED BOOKS: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
  6. UNSEEN TRANSLATION PAPER
  7. FURTHER SUBJECT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

ADVANCED ECONOMIC THEORY
CURRENCY AND CREDIT
LABOUR MOVEMENTS SINCE 1815

 

  1. BRITISH SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY
  2. PRESCRIBED BOOKS: POLITICAL ECONOMY
  3. MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

_____________________

“By 1930, however, the total number of PPE candidates had risen to 102, thus necessitating an additional examiner in economics. In 1931, the total number of candidates increased by one-third again, to 132. …Between 1931 and 1939, there were always two Oxford-based economists on the Committee [of examiners]. In 1931, Hall joined Hargreaves, and they both also served as examiners in 1932. “

Source:   W. Young and F. Lee, Oxford Economics and Oxford Economists, p. 82

______________________

Cover letter from Robert Hall to Wesley Clair Mitchell

Trinity College,
Oxford.

13.XI.31

Dear Mitchell,

Here are the papers set last year. I have divided them into three groups which will explain them: everyone takes ten papers of which seven are common to all.

I have seen practically everyone about the matter we discussed on Monday and they all feel that the course you suggested should be followed. Hargreaves has written to MacGregor inviting him to come next Tuesday.

If you have not already been invited to the Political Economy Club dinner on Saturday the 21st would you come with me? Harrod is speaking on the balance of trade between gold-standard countries.

Yours very sincerely,

Robert Hall

______________________

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

III
POLITICAL ECONOMY

  1. ‘To show that both under-population and over-population are possible is not the same thing as showing that either of these things exists now or has ever existed.’ Consider this statement.
  2. What importance do you attach to the distinction between long and short periods in an analysis of cost of production?
  3. What do you understand by the principle of charging ‘what the traffic will bear’? How far is it applicable outside the sphere of transport charges?
  4. Can the phenomenon of a rate of interest be adequately explained as the result of a preference for present over future income?
  5. ‘It is an illusion to suppose that the general level of wages can be appreciably and permanently raised by Trade Union action except in so far as it increases the efficiency of the workers, or incidentally stimulates the efficiency of the employers.’ Examine this assertion.
  6. What costs does the presence of risk and uncertainty entail? How is the burden of these costs actually borne and distributed?
  7. ‘Any formula which may be used to demonstrate that rent is a surplus may equally well be used to demonstrate that wages and interest are surpluses.’ Discuss this view.
  8. Is the aggregate volume of employment likely to be diminished by the introduction of new mechanical processes?
  9. What are the necessary conditions for the maintenance and effective operation of an international gold standard? Are these conditions realized to-day?
  10. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a policy of State control of foreign investment?
  11. What effects may different forms of protective tariffs be expected to produce upon the distribution of income within a community?
  12. In what different senses my the term ‘taxable capacity’ be used? How far is it possible to attach a precise meaning to the term in any of these uses?

[T.T. 1931.]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

IV
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION

[Questions should be attempted from each section]
A

  1. Discuss the view that to rely, for the preservation of peace, on the use of military and economic sanctions by the League of Nations, is to defeat the purpose of the League.
  2. Examine the effect of the separation of executive and legislative powers on American politics.
  3. ‘In spite of outward appearances the multi-party system of Germany and France provides more stable, more efficient, and more representative government than the English system.’ Discuss this statement.
  4. Discuss the merits of direct and indirect election as a means of choosing a second chamber.
  5. ‘No branch of government more immediately and more deeply affects the lives of ordinary citizens than the currency and banking policy of the State, and yet there is no branch of government which is less suitable for popular control.’ Do you see any solution to this difficulty?
  6. Discuss the view that substantial economies ought to be effected in this country by reducing the number of government servants.

B

  1. How far do you consider that control by the workers engaged in an industry is compatible with industrial efficiency.
  2. Discuss the effects of the increased burden of fixed interest charges caused by the recent fall in prices.
  3. ‘In view of the disparity between wholesale and retail prices, marketing rather than production is the most suitable sphere for state control.’ Examine this statement.
  4. Is the future development of British industry more likely to come from a revival of the exporting industries or from the expansion of new types of production?
  5. Discuss the view that expenditure on social services is a better investment for the community than the increase of private savings.
  6. Is the Stock Exchange necessary for the direction of capital into industry?

[T.T. 1931.]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

VIII
BRITISH SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY

  1. ‘The agrarian Revolution took place earlier, and without its results the industrial Revolution would have been impossible’ (Brentano). Consider this judgment.
  2. Describe the changes which occurred in the localization of industries between 1760 and 1830.
  3. Did the British fiscal system during the first half of the nineteenth century seriously restrict industrial development?
  4. Examine the distribution and the effect of immigration into Great Britain.
  5. Describe and account for the changes in Trade Union policy between 1825 and 1870.
  6. ‘A more miserable history can hardly be found than that of the attempts of the Bank to keep a reserve and to manage a foreign drain between the year 1819 and the year 1857.’ Was Bagehot’s criticism of the policy of the Bank of England justified?
  7. What measures were taken to improve the living conditions of the working classes in the period 1836-90?
  8. ‘High farming the best substitute for Protection.’ How far were the methods and organization of British agriculture successfully adapted to the situation following upon the repeal of the Corn Laws?
  9. ‘The basis of taxation is extremely narrow (Goschen). To what extent was this true of the tax system in the period 1860-90?
  10. What changes did the University of Oxford undergo in the nineteenth century?
  11. What attempts has Parliament made to secure effective control over the development of mechanical transport?
  12. What part has the principle of the workhouse test played in the administration of the English poor law?

[T.T. 1931]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

IX
PRESCRIBED BOOKS: POLITICAL ECONOMY

  1. ‘Every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends either directly or indirectly to raise the real rent of land.’ Discuss the manner in which Adam Smith reaches this conclusion.
  2. ‘The number of productive labourers can never be much increased but in consequence of an increase of capital.’ Does Adam Smith give a coherent account of the nature of capital?
  3. Can a clear account of the causes and effects of inflation be derived from Adam Smith and Ricardo?
  4. Compare the theories of Adam Smith and Ricardo on the mechanism of foreign trade.
  5. What is the importance of normal costs of production in Ricardo’s system?
  6. Can Ricardo’s views on the incidence of taxation be reconciled with modern theories on the subject?
  7. Is it fair to say that false hypotheses about the laws of population vitiate the accounts given by Ricardo and Marx of the relations between the profits of capital and the wages of labour?
  8. In what sense, if any, can commodities be said to contain ‘congealed labour-time’?
  9. ‘The starting-point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist was the servitude of the labourer.’ Discuss this statement.
  10. Discuss the views of the three writers on the place of competition in economic life.

[T. T. 1931]

_________________________________

Note by Hall:

“One of these 3. The best people do the first: the worst the last. (Economists only)”

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

VII
FURTHER SUBJECT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
ADVANCED ECONOMIC THEORY

  1. ‘But if quantitative analysis can give us empirically valid demand curves…shall we not have a better theory of demand than qualitative analysis can supply?’ Discuss this view of economic method.
  2. Consider the problem of the attribution of portions of the product to units of productive factors.
  3. In what circumstances can it be said that a price is indeterminate?
  4. Consider the relation between enterprise and saving.
  5. Is it possible to construct a tax system on the principle of equal sacrifice?
  6. Discuss the problem of weighting in connexion with the construction of some type of index number.
  7. Consider the difficulties of economic forecasting.
  8. Give an account of the principal formulae connecting money and prices, with reference to the availability of statistical evidence.
  9. Can trade depressions be attributed either to under-consumption or to under-investment?
  10. How would you expect the price system of a Socialist economy to differ from that of a competitive one?

[T.T. 1931]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

VII
FURTHER SUBJECT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
CURRENCY AND CREDIT

  1. ‘The equations of the Quantity Theory of Money are truisms which tell us nothing in themselves.’ Discuss this view.
  2. Can the purchasing power of money be satisfactorily expressed in terms of a ‘general level of prices’?
  3. What types of legal regulation prevail to-day with regard to the cash reserves of central banks? To what extent may these regulations be regarded as obsolete?
  4. What grounds are there for assuming that the world’s annual supplies of gold are likely to prove inadequate to future monetary requirements?
  5. How far can the control of credit be effectively secured through the purchase and sale of securities by a central bank?
  6. Describe the chief features of British monetary policy between 1914 and 1925.
  7. ‘Booms and slumps are simply the expression of the results of an oscillation of the terms of credit about their equilibrium position.’ Consider this statement.
  8. How would you proceed to measure the purchasing power parity between two currencies?
  9. How far does experience indicate the practicability of a discrimination on the part of bankers between the different purposes to which credit may be applied?
  10. What are the main considerations which should govern the policy of a super-national bank?
  11. Give an account of the operation of the Indian Gold Exchange Standard between 1898 and 1914.
  12. ‘Banks can only lend what the public has entrusted to them.’ Examine this view.

[T. T. 1931]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

VII
FURTHER SUBJECT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
LABOUR MOVEMENTS SINCE 1815

  1. What were the principles of Owenism, and what attempts were made to apply them?
  2. Describe and account for the attitude of the Chartists towards the movement for the repeal of the Corn Laws.
  3. ‘The creation of a normal working day is the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class’ (Marx). Does the history of factory legislation support this view?
  4. What changes in the legal status of Trade Unions were effected by the legislation of the years 1868-76?
  5. To what extent were trade unionists influenced by the wage theories of orthodox political economists during the latter half of the nineteenth century?
  6. To what influences was the emergence of the New Unionism of 1889-90 due?
  7. What have been the causes of the success of the Consumers’ Co-operative Movement in Great Britain?
  8. Examine and compare the various educational experiments which have been associated with working-class movements in Great Britain.
  9. ‘Of real Syndicalism there is in England probably none.’ How far was this statement true of the period 1906-14?
  10. What attempts have been made to deal with the special problems connected with casual labour?
  11. Discuss the attitude of the British Labour leaders to the Second and Third Internationals.

[T.T. 1931]

_________________________________

Note by Hall:

“These are the non-economic papers taken—a paper in Kant can be substituted for No. V. (Prescribed Books) but this is the usual one.”

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

I
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

  1. Explain and criticize Descartes’ view of the method of mathematics.
  2. Does either Spinoza or Leibniz give a coherent account of the apparent multiplicity of objects in the world?
  3. What reasons led Leibniz to his conception of the monad?
  4. Is Locke’s account of the origination of ideas satisfactory?
  5. Give an account of Berkeley’s theory of perception.
  6. Examine the grounds for the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
  7. Discuss Hume’s criticism of the notion of the self.
  8. What is meant by apperception?
  9. On what grounds can a distinction be drawn between understanding and reason?
  10. ‘Its religious character is an essential feature of English Idealism, and the guiding principle of its development.’ Discuss this statement in regard to any one British Idealist.
  11. Examine any modern account of the nature and origin of belief.
  12. Is any satisfactory account known to you of the place of evil in the world?
  13. Explain, and estimate the success of, the attempt of any one philosopher to refute materialism.
  14. What is the function of philosophy according to any one modern philosopher?
  15. Discuss the account given by any one modern philosopher of the relation between the human mind and its body.

[T.T. 1931]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

II
BRITISH CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY

[Candidates are expected to answer questions from both sections of the paper.]

A

  1. To what extent were Parliamentary elections in the boroughs under the control of the Crown and of private individuals at the beginning of the reign of George III?
  2. What different ideas in political thought are represented in the careers of Burke and Fox?
  3. Discuss the problems raised by cases involving the privileges of the House of Commons between 1760 and 1860.
  4. ‘The Commons were right in accusing him; the Lords were right in acquitting him.’ Discuss this verdict on the impeachment of Warren Hastings.
  5. Discuss the view that Britain has never been in greater danger than at the time of the Treaty of Tilsit.
  6. How far does the history of England between 1822 and 1830 prove that good government without representative government is not enough?
  7. What problems were left unsolved by the Union with Ireland in 1801?
  8. What truth is there in the view that the Whig governments in the decade after the Reform Bill proved themselves to be as incompetent in financial questions as they were competent in political questions?
  9. Compare the extent of the personal influence of the monarch under George III and under Queen Victoria.

B

  1. ‘But then you have been Prime Minister in a sense in which no other man has been it since Mr. Pitt’s time’ (Gladstone, 1846). Discuss this estimate of Peel as a Prime Minister.
  2. How far were any British interests served by the Crimean War?
  3. ‘The real struggle in nineteenth-century England was not between Conservatives and Liberals but between rationalists and romantics in politics.’ Discuss.
  4. Discuss the view that the pre-war system of rigidly organized parties really dates from 1868.
  5. Discuss the claims of Disraeli’s administration from 1874 to 1880 to be considered more truly democratic than the administration of Gladstone which precede it.
  6. How far is it true to say that the South African War was due to the alternation between a policy of authority and a policy of conciliation?
  7. Estimate the effect on the Conservative Party of the adhesion of Joseph Chamberlain.
  8. Discuss the chief conflicts between the Commons and the Lords between 1860 and 1911.
  9. ‘A party without a policy and without philosophy.’ How far do you agree with this dictum of The Times on the Liberal party in 1906?

[T. T. 1931.]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

X
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

  1. Of what value is the distinction between means and ends in moral inquiry?
  2. Can I ever do what I do not want to do?
  3. Is determinism compatible with belief in real values?
  4. ‘To know all is to pardon all.’ Is this true?
  5. Criticize the view that the will is identical with practical reason.
  6. ‘I ought to do what I believe to be right, even though my belief may be false.’ Is this view tenable?
  7. Can adequate grounds be given for asserting either that it is always wrong or that it is nearly always wrong to lie?
  8. ‘Every one to count as one, and no one to count as more than one.’ Is this a moral axiom?
  9. What is meant by obedience?
  10. Is the state the guardian of morality?
  11. Does the doctrine of the General Will imply the existence of a Group Mind?
  12. On what principles should a man who owes allegiance to more than one association decide which he is to obey?
  13. On what grounds can democracy be defended?

[T. T.  1931.]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

V
PRESCRIBED BOOKS: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

  1. Discuss the view that Burke’s advocacy of the claims of expediency rather than right in dealing with the American colonies was a shallow and temporizing approach to a fundamental problem of politics.
  2. ‘But nothing in progression can rest on its original plan.’ How far did Burke apply this doctrine consistently in his political thinking?
  3. How far was Durham’s recommendation of union for Canada influenced by economic considerations?
  4. ‘We have not succeeded in making education practical.’ Do you consider that this statement in the India Report uncovers the main cause of discontent, and at the same time points to the most important remedy?
  5. How far are Mill’s proposed limitations of universal suffrage consistent with his general political principles?
  6. Comment on the view that Mill’s observations on Second Chambers are more sensible than those of Esmein and more profound than those of Bryce.
  7. Examine Bryce’s view of the special defects and dangers in the political systems of Australia and New Zealand.
  8. Assuming that the presumption of argument is in favour of the accurate representations of opinion, in what situations would you hold Proportional Representation to be undesirable?
  9. To what extent does Bryce’s treatise on democracy suffer from the omission of the United Kingdom from the countries he presents for examination?
  10. ‘Ce qui constitue en droit une nation, c’est l’existence, dans cette société d’hommes, d’une autorité supérieure aux volontés individuelles.’ Is it necessary for the preservation of this authority to formulate a theory of sovereignty in such terms as Esmein uses?
  11. ‘Dicey’s vindication of the rule of law holds good with regard to personal liberty but not with regard to security of property.’ Discuss this view.
  12. How far would you agree with the statement that the conventions of a constitution may become more rigid than its laws?

[T. T. 1931.]

SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATION
Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

VI
UNSEEN TRANSLATION PAPER

[Candidates are required to complete at least ONE of the following passages from each of two languages]

Translate into English:—

(a) De ce chef, la question prend une ampleur angoissante. L’utilisation de l’aviation dans la vie contemporaine est déjà telle, les perspectives qu’ouvre son développement ultérieur certain sont si larges, les services qu’elle doit rendre s’annoncent comme si étendus, qu’on voit mal comment l’humanité pourrait y renoncer. L’aviation est entrée dans notre existence quotidienne, et la part qu’elle  prendra dans la vie internationale, spécialement dans la vie économique, ne peut que grandir: le monde des affaire n’abandonnerait pas volontiers les possibilités énormes que lui donne dès aujourd’hui l’aviation, les espérances plus grandes encore qu’elle lui fait concevoir pour demain. On en revient à la fable d’Ésope: l’aviation, comme la langue, est la meilleure et la pire des choses. Puissant facteur du développement des relations internationales dans tous les domaines, elle est en même temps—ou elle peut être, suivant les intentions de ceux qui l’emploient, — un puissant facteur de destruction internationale. N’est-ce pas, dira-t-on, la rançon de tout ce qui représente un progrès matériel? Les chemins de fer, l’automobile, ne participent-ils pas aussi à la fois du bien de du mal? Les transports par voie ferrée ou par camions routiers n’ont-ils pas joué un rôle considérable dans les opérations de la guerre mondiale? C’est vrai. Mais l’aviation représente un danger d’un ordre particulier.

(b) Mais les gens qui vivaient alors, qui étaient attachés au gouvernement républicain par tradition et par souvenir, qui se rappelaient les grandes choses qu’il avait faites, qui lui devaient leurs dignités, leur position et leur renommée, pouvaient-ils penser comme nous et prendre aussi facilement leur parti de sa chute? D’abord ce gouvernement existait. On était familiarisé avec ses défauts depuis si longtemps qu’on vivait avec eux. On en souffrait moins par l’habitude qu’on avait de les supporter. Au contraire on ne savait pas ce que serait ce pouvoir nouveau qui voulait remplacer la république. La royauté inspirait une répugnance instinctive aux Romains, surtout depuis qu’ils avaient conquis l’Orient. Ils avaient trouvé là, sous ce nom, le plus odieux des régimes, l’asservissement le plus complet au milieu de la civilisation la plus raffinée, tous les plaisirs du luxe et des arts, le plus bel épanouissement de l’intelligence avec la tyrannie la plus lourde et la plus basse, des princes accoutumés à se jouer de la fortune, de l’honneur, de la vie des hommes, sortes d’enfants gâtés cruels comme on n’en rencontre plus que dans les déserts de l’Afrique. Ce tableau n’était pas fait pour les séduire, et quelques inconvénients qu’eût la république, ils se demandaient s’il valait la peine de les échanger contre ceux que pouvait avoir la royauté.

(c) Kants Vater war ein Mann von offenem, geradem Verstande, der Arbeitsamkeit und Ehrlichkeit als höchste Tugenden ansah, zu denen er auch seine Kinder erzog. Tieferen Einfluß auf den Sohn hatte die Mutter, die er schildert al seine Frau von großem natürlichen Verstand, einem edlen Herzen und einer echten, durchaus nicht schwärmerischen Religiosität. Sie ging oft mit dem Jungen ins Freie, machte ihn auf Gegenstände und Vorgänge in der Natur aufmerksam, lehrte ihn nützliche Kräuter kennen, erzählte ihm vom Bau des Himmels und pries ihm die Allmacht, Weisheit und Güte Gottes. Noch als Greis gestand Kant: ‚Ich werde meine Mutte [sic] nie vergessen; denn sie pflanzte und nährte den ersten Keim des Guten in mir, sie öffnete mein Herz den Eindrücken der Natur; sie weckte und erweiterte meine Begriffe, und ihre Lehren haben einen immerwährenden heilsamen Einfluß auf mein Leben gehabt.’ Er war auch der Meinung, seine Gesichtszüge und seine körperliche Konstitution, bis auf die eingebogene Brust, habe er von der Mutter geerbt. Tief hat er es stets bedauert, daß er sie bereits als Dreizehnjähriger verlor. Am Bette einer an typhösen Fieber enkrankten [sic] Freundin holte sie sich dieselbe Krankheit und starb in ihrem vierzigsten Lebensjahr bereits 1737. Fünf Jahre vorher war Kant als Achtjähriger in die beste Schule seiner Vaterstadt, das Collegium Fridericianum (ein heute noch bestehendes Gymnasium), aufgenommen worden.

(d) Es geht bei der Philosophie fast wie bei der Politik. Wenn hier auch nicht jeder des Aristoteles acht Bücher vom Staate, Spinozas Tractatus theologico-politicus oder Montesquieus ‘Geist der Gesetze’ liest, so halt er doch seine Zeitung, sucht sich die Geschehnisse zurecht zu legen und bekennt sich zu gewissen Prinzipien und Parteien. Ähnlich in der Philosophie. Gar manchen, der wenig von all den Systemen weiß, die, seit Thales die Welt aus dem Wasser entstehen ließ, aus den wogenden Gedanken hervorragender Geister auftauchten, haben doch die philosophischen Probleme nicht ganz unberührt gelassen. Auch ihn haben die großen Rätsel des Menschenlebens und Weltzusammenhangs beunruhigt gelassen. Auch ihn haben die großen Rätsel des Menschenlebens und Weltzusammenhangs beunruhigt und, nach der Lösung suchend, hat er sich Meinungen gebildet, die dann lange Zeit gehegt, vielleicht auch von anderen in seiner Umgebung geteilt, sich schließlich für ihn mit der ganzen Macht der Gewohnheit und des Gefühls umkleideten und wie etwas selbstverständlich Evidentes in seinem Kopfe festgesetzt haben. Was ist denn nun aber die Philosophie, für die sich so viele interessieren, wenn sie auch ihre Schwierigkeit und das Erfordernis sorgsamer Vorbereitung nicht immer genügend würdigen? Wir sprachen eben davon, wie auf diesem Gebiete fast jeder leichthin und kühnlich zu urteilen wage. Seltsam darum, wenigstens für den Augenblick, daß doch die scheinbar einfache und elementare Frage, was die Philosophie sei, die Leute gemeiniglich in eine nicht geringe Verlegenheit bringt. Wenden wir uns aber damit statt an die philosophischen Dilettanten an die Berufsphilosophen, so hat von diesen zwar gewiß jeder eine Antwort bereit, aber fast jeder eine andere.

(e) La ricchezza e la prosperità inglese aumentavano dunque in questo tempo, ma tendevano ancora ad un timido piede di casa, e trovando nell’agricoltura larghe possibilità di investimento, cercavano di ripiegarsi su di essa, come nell’impiego più sicuro, ed era questo un fenomeno che non solo riguardava l’aristocrazia campagnola e gli affittuari di terre, ma anche i borghesi manifatturieri di città che consideravano le loro industrie come un mezzo di far denaro, considerando l’agricoltura un mezzo per impiegarlo. Quindi il capitale inglese, rapidamente crescente, aveva la pacifica tendenza a ripiegarsi sui più sicuri impieghi terrieri o, tutt’ al più, sulle industrie cittadine largamente protette; certo nella sua gran massa, se si eccettuano gli avventurosi armatori di navi corsare come quelle di Drake o i monopolisti del commercio internazionale, mal volentieri si avventurava ad imprese marinare e si investiva in navi, anzi sentiva così poco la necessità economica di una florida marina mercantile che perfino rifiutava di contribuire alla creazione di una marina reale che lo proteggesse e alla difesa della costa e dei porti sui quali neppur mancavano le incursioni barbaresche e lasciava affittare agli olandesi per un misero canone la pesca sulle sue coste.

(f) Nasce da questo una disputa: ‘S’egli è meglio essere amato che temuto, o temuto che amato.’ Rispondesi, che si vorrebbe essere l’uno e l’altro; ma perché gli è difficile che gli stiano insieme, è molto più securo l’esser temuto che amato, quando s’abbi a mancare dell’un de’duoi. Perchè degli uomini si può dir questo generalmente, che sieno ingrati, volubili, simulatori, fuggitori de’pericoli, cupidi di guadagno: e mentre fai lor bene, sono tutti tuoi, ti offeriscono il sangue, la roba, la vita, ed i figli, come di sopra dissi, quando il bisogno è discosto; ma quando ti si appressa, si rivoltano. E quel principe che si è tutto fondato in su le parole loro, trovandosi nudo d’altri preparamenti, rovina: perchè l’amicizie che si acquistano con il prezzo, e non con grandezza e nobiltà d’animo, si meritano, ma le non s’hanno, ed a’tempi non si possono spendere. E gli uomini hanno men rispetto d’offendere uno che si facci amare, che uno che si facci temere: perché l’amore è tenuto da un vinculo d’obbligo, il quale, per esser gli uomini tristi, da ogni occasione di propria utilità è rotto; ma il timore è tenuto da una paura di pena, che non abbandona mai.

[T. T. 1931.]

Source:  Columbia University Libraries Manuscript Collections. Mitchell, W. C. Collection, Box 10, Folder “Hall Robert, 13 Nov 1931”.

Image Source:  Robert Lowell Hall  .

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Columbia. Memorial Minute for Wesley Clair Mitchell, 1949

 

Memorial minutes entered into a faculty’s record have the virtue of being brief and typically are written by someone who has had a close personal/professional relationship with the subject as seen in the following memorial minute delivered by Wesley Clair Mitchell’s student and later colleague, Frederick C. Mills.

The dual memoir Two Lives–The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself, written by Mitchell’s wife Lucy Sprague Mitchell is available at hathitrust.org and provides much detail, e.g. an eight page autobiographical letter written by Mitchell in 1911.

______________________

WESLEY CLAIR MITCHELL
Memorial Minute read by Professor F. C. Mills
February 18, 1949

Wesley Clair Mitchell, Professor Emeritus of Economics, died in New York City on October 29, 1948. In his death the world lost one of the great scholars of our generation and the members of this Faculty lost a distinguished colleague and a cherished friend.

Wesley Mitchell was born in Rushville, Illinois, on August 5, 1874, the son of a country doctor who had won the rank of Brevet Colonel as a Civil War surgeon. The family was of New England stock, and although a middle-western boyhood and later adult years in California and New York left their impress on Mitchell, something of the New England strain was always discernible in the pattern of his thought and life.

Mitchell’s student days, undergraduate and graduate, were spent at the University of Chicago, with a one-year interim period at Halle and Vienna. The influence of the German and Austrian residence was slight; Mitchell was a product of American university training in the period of vigorous growth that came at the turn of the century. His outstanding qualities as an economist were distinctive of ways of thought and study that were largely indigenous to this country. Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, J. Laurence Laughlin in their several ways deeply affected Mitchell’s thinking and his way of conceiving of the problems of society.

Following a year at the Census Bureau and a short term as instructor at the University of Chicago, Mitchell moved in 1902 to the University of California, at Berkeley, to begin a decade of fruitful work and of steady personal growth. His tools of research were sharpened and his mastery of them perfected. The brilliant studies of the greenback period, in which the pattern of his scholarly work was first defined, were extended. The massive monograph on Business Cycles, one of the great products of scholarship in the social sciences, was here completed. But beyond these solid contributions to economic thought and method this was a rich period inMitchell’s life, to which he always looked back as something of a personal golden age. A young man intellectually somewhat aloof and inclined toward austerity mellowed in the sunshine of the west and in the easy, pleasant companionships of the young University. He took to the Sierras avidly, relishing the free ways, the free language and the physical release to be found in mountain climbing. A companion of those days says that Wesley’s inhibitions were peeled off like the layers of an onion as successive altitude levels were passed. He found a wife, too, in the west; when he left California in 1912 he took with him the Dean of Women of the University.

Wesley Mitchell’s service at Columbia began in 1913 and extended to the date of his retirement in 1944, except for a three-year term at the New School for Social Research. Indeed, his Columbia connection extended, properly, to the day of his death, for there was no time when we did not consider him one of us, or when he did not so regard himself. Mitchell’s reputation had been established by the time he came to Columbia; he had reached full scholarly maturity. Yet his growth continued and his accomplishments multiplied. A steady (but not a voluminous) flow of papers, reviews, addresses and more extensive studies came from his pen. Into each, whether brief or extended, went care in the construction of a logical and orderly argument, skill in the marshaling of evidence, and objectivity in the use of that evidence. Each, too, was in exposition a work of craftsmanship by a man whose ear was extraordinarily sensitive to the rhythms of our language and whose mind was alert to shades of meaning and subtleties of expression.

There was also an almost uninterrupted series of public and professional services and of accumulating honors. He was Chief of the Price Section of the War Industries Board during the first World War, chairman of the President’s Committee on Recent Social Trends, a member of the National Planning Board, the National Resources Board, and the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, and chairman of the Committee on the Cost of Living when that burning issue threatened to check the steady production of goods during the second World War. There was the launching in 1920 and the directing for a quarter of a century of a new instrument for the advancement of knowledge—the National Bureau of Economic Research. Over a long stretch of years he helped to break down the barriers between the social sciences and to unify their activities in the Social Science Research Council. He was one of those who founded and shaped the New School for Social Research. Counsel and guidance were given over many years to the Bureau of Educational Experiments. He was called upon to direct the affairs of professional societies, serving as President of the American Economic Association, the American Statistical Association, the Econometric Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There were elections to learned societies at home and abroad. Honorary degrees came from Oxford, the University of Paris, and from major universities in this country. These were rich honors and they were not unwelcome; but he remained to the day of his death a modest scholar, who would both gladly learn and gladly teach.

It was as teacher and scholar that Mitchell’s greatest services were rendered to Columbia, and it was in these roles that he was best known to us of this Faculty. Mitchell possessed in high degree the qualities of a good teacher. There was insight in his analyses; there was a freshness of view that he never lost; there was lucidity of thought and expression; there was a sense of sharing with the student the task of inquiry. Above all, perhaps, was the sense of integrity. Here was a man without affectation, without pretense, who honestly sought understanding.

The specific contributions that Mitchell made to economics will be duly appraised by his colleagues in that profession. As members of a political science faculty, however, it is proper for us to recognize the service of Mitchell in breaking economics out of the tight formalism of the tradition that prevailed when he came to the subject. He was profoundly unhappy about economics as a branch of logic, dealing with the interaction of atoms in the form of human reasoning machines, subjecting itself only to tests of logical consistency, almost indifferent to the relevance of its principles to complex and constantly changing reality. Mitchell himself was not unskilled in the spinning of deductive arguments, but he was keenly aware of the dangers of self-delusion in unchecked rationalism. His bent was empirical; his emphasis in research was on the constant checking of reason against observation. First in the monetary field, later in the study of prices, of business cycles, and of national income, he developed and refined methods of quantitative analysis and stimulated a movement that has deeply affected the character of economic research and the content of economic thought the world over. But Mitchell’s concern was never with method as method. Man was at the center. Economics was to him on of the sciences of human behavior. And the human being with whose actions he was concerned was a complex creature whose motives could not be reduced to the reasoned balancing of satisfactions against pains or of prospective gains against prospective losses. He stressed the role in economics of institutions — of money, of the industrial system — which man had shaped and which in turn were shaping him; in so doing he helped to turn many younger economists to the study of a neglected phase of economic life. These various aspects of Mitchell’s thought are developed in treatises and shorter papers published over a period of fifty years. They are outstandingly revealed in the series of books on business cycles that are Mitchell’s greatest substantive contribution to economics.

Some of the personal qualities of Wesley Mitchell have been suggested in this brief account of his work. But there was much more than this. He was a lover of poetry whose mind was stocked with verse. He was a connoisseur of mystery stories who could warmly resent the moral betrayal of the reader when the author played unfairly with him. He was a craftsman, skilled in the fine art of woodwork. He was tenacious and unremitting in seeking principles of order in human affairs, yet free from dogmatism and open to criticism and advice from his youngest associates. He was a kindly and generous man, a source of continuing and friendly inspiration to students and colleagues alike. In his life’s work Mitchell served the human race. In his own being he helped to give dignity to that race.

 

Source: Memorial Minute on Professor Wesley C. Mitchell read by Professor F. C. Mills at the meeting of Faculty of Political Science of February 18, 1949. Appended to the Minutes of the Faculty Meeting.

Image Source:Foundation for the Study of Cycles Website  .

Categories
Columbia Economists

Columbia. Arrow on the Subordination of Price Theory, 1940-42

 

Reading this account by Kenneth Arrow, I wondered why the lecturer in his history of economic thought course was not identified by name and who the lecturer was. In the Arrow papers at Duke’s Economists’ Papers Archive one finds his notes to John Maurice Clark’s course “On Current Types of Economic Theory” so for now I’ll presume that the son of the great John Bates Clark was the unknown lecturer of Arrow’s anecdote. 

_________________________

Kenneth Arrow Recalls the Subordination of Price Theory at Columbia

The intellectual environment at Columbia University when I was a graduate student in 1940-1942 was far different from that in which the modern graduate student in economics finds himself. Neoclassical price theory now holds pride of place, as all students will acknowledge, some joyfully, some ruefully. But at Columbia at that period there was no required course in price theory. Indeed there was no course at all offered which gave a systematic exposition of microeconomics, except for Harold Hotelling’s one term offering of mathematical economics, the content of which would today be more or less standard for a general course but which was then regarded as highly esoteric indeed. The one required course which was most nearly equivalent to price theory was a course on the history of economic thought, where the lecturer gave potted summaries of everyone from the mercantilists on. Walras was barely mentioned and certainly was much less prominent than H. J. Davenport. Keynes was not mentioned (for that matter the General Theory was not mentioned even in the course on business cycles, though there were some glancing references to the Treatise on Money).

But the work of Thorstein Veblen was indeed prominently displayed in the course on economic thought, and it was no accident. The corrosive skepticism of Veblen towards “received” theory had, belatedly and even posthumously, under mined the never-very-secure hold of neoclassical thought on teaching of American economics. Of course he was not alone in effecting the change; the more benign, but equally negative, judgments of John R. Commons, in whose name we are gathered, shaped a generation of economists trained under him at the University of Wisconsin. At Columbia, the channel of influence was Wesley C. Mitchell, creator of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His version of the attack upon neoclassical economics was an insistence on the large-scale accumulation of data. It was in large part his direct influence plus the general background created by Veblen and Commons that led to the subordination of price theory at Columbia.

Source: From Kenneth J. Arrow, “John R. Commons Award Paper: Thorstein Veblen as an Economic Theorist.” The American Economist 19, no. 1 (1975): 5-9.

Image Source:  Kenneth J. Arrow as Guggenheim Fellow (1972)  John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Categories
Economists NBER

NBER. Mitchell to Burns about Friedman. 1945

 

 

Reading the letter written by Wesley Clair Mitchell, the Director of Research at the NBER, to Arthur Burns in which Mitchell offers discouraging words regarding an appointment at NBER for Milton Friedman in 1945, it is interesting to see how Milton Friedman and his wife report on the controversy that very clearly influenced Mitchell’s personal opinion of Milton Friedman. What is not yet clear is whether Arthur Burns ultimately made an offer to Friedman or whether it was perhaps the timely offer arranged by George Stigler for Milton Friedman to teach at the University of Minnesota that made a NBER appointment a moot point.

_______________________________

The Friedmans Remember

The publication of the NBER book by Simon Kuznets and Milton Friedman Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (1945) was delayed four years in part because of the new demands for statistical and economic analyses due to World War II. In Milton Friedman’s judgment the delay was caused “mostly by a controversy about one part of the manuscript” that attributed half the observed excess average income of physicians over dentists to “the difference in ease of entry, produced at least in part by the success of the American Medical Association in limiting entry into medicine.” (pp. 71-72) A member of the special reading committee of directors appointed to evaluate the manuscript, C. Reinhold Noyes, did not agree and wrote “I suggest that the subject of freedom of entry is a hot poker and be dropped.” Friedman described how he and Kuznets wrote eighty pages worth of memos in response to this and other criticisms of Noyes. In his account of the controversy, Milton Friedman has nothing but praise for Wesley Clair Mitchell: “Three years of back and forth discussion followed, with Wesley Mitchell…supporting the scientific freedom of bureau authors…In later years I came to appreciate how rare is the combination of toughness and diplomacy that Mitchell demonstrated in defense of our scientific freedom.” (pp. 74-76)

Rose Friedman wrote about her worries about her husband’s job prospects after World War II ended.

“Presumably he could have gone back to the Treasury but that was the last thing he wanted to do. A government career was never Milton’s choice. He could always return to the National Bureau, but I knew that too was not Milton’s preference. An academic career was what he wanted. By early September, when we moved back to our apartment in Manhattan, Milton had received no offer for the fall. As an inveterate worrier always fearing the worst, I was not happy. I remember very well a visit from the Burnses and Arthur’s attempt, while Milton was temporarily out of the room to reassure me by telling me that Milton was very gifted and would make it to the top and that I had no reason to be concerned.” (p. 147)

 

Source: Milton and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago, 1998).

_______________________________

 

Letter from Wesley Clair Mitchell to Arthur Burns

 

Huckleberry Rocks
Greensboro, Vermont

August 27 1945

Dear Arthur

Milton offers a problem that is painful indeed, but we ought to face it squarely. You know how highly I value Simon’s [Kuznets] judgment as well as your own. Both of you have longer + more intimate acquaintance with M. than have I. I am sure both of you try to be objective about him. So do I. That we differ must be due to the unlike weights we attach to qualities we agree, or admit, he possesses.

We agree about his acute mind, about his thorough training in mathematical statistics + mathematical economics, about his creative powers at least in the first of these fields and probably in the second, about his personal likeability, + about his honesty of intention. We must admit that he has fooled himself, unwittingly, + thereby fooled all three of us who were so predisposed to accept his findings. Do you remember that first paper in which M. argued that the incomes of physicians run substantially higher than those of dentists, + the criticisms Fred Mills made of the averages on which M. rested his conclusion? Simon was annoyed by Mills; you were annoyed by him; I was a little annoyed; but Mills was right in large part. Then came the second + graver case brought out by Noyes’ rather brutal attack which enlisted my sympathies as well as yours + Simon’s warmly on Milton’s side. M. drew up a table that seemed to settle the critical issue in his favor. It was made from data he had collected + studied. We knew nothing about these materials in detail. Simon accepted the results. You accepted them. I accepted them with pleasure. Noyes’ second set of criticisms forced a more searching examination. I put in more than a month of careful study + concluded that M. had misused his data in several ways + reached an indefensible conclusion. The best thing about that sad affair was that M. frankly admitted his errors.

I think Milton’s troubles arose from accepting a conclusion about the monopolistic practice of the medical societies, feeling sure that restriction of entry must tend to increase the incomes of medical practitioners, + so accepting at face value any statistical evidence that pointed in the direction he knew to be right. We are all of us subject to this type of error. We examine far more critically evidence that appears to run counter to our hypotheses than evidence that supports them. But M. seems to me worse than most of us on this respect.

Another weakness that I think hurts Milton is lack of interest in and appreciation of non-rational factors that influence, + sometimes dominate, economic behavior. They cannot be handled effectively by the calculus of economic theory concerned with what it is to the interest of men to do. Milton’s clever appraisal of the effect of the higher costs of medical than of dental education is a brilliant specimen of this sort of theorizing. Of course he knows his argument is most unrealistic + says so. Under pressure of criticisms he stressed his qualifications still further. What does such an analysis really add to our knowledge of how men choose their occupations? Can’t the simple bits of truth in the proposition that high costs of training limit the number who enter a profession be put better in simpler form? Why work out an accountant’s estimate in detail when you have to add that few men are able to do such work correctly; that still fewer possess the concrete evidence needed to give the estimate some air of reality; that a man clever enough to do the job + possessed of the factual data would realize that conditions might well change by the time he or his son was ready to set up in practice, + that no one should suppose that choices are really made in this way?

I wish I could share your intuitive faith that M. “has more to contribute to economic science than any man of his generation.” If only we could find the man of whom this remark is true + draw him into the National Bureau, I should be happy indeed! Whoever he may be, he has more insight into human nature than Milton has been blessed with.

Nor do I think you would be wise in taking on a man whom you would have to follow through all the details of his work to make sure that his deficiencies, genuine or problematical, would never again embarrass us. As director of research, you need colleagues who know a great deal more than you will have time to learn about the materials they are severally handling. The kind of watching M. needs is not critical examination of his statistical methods + general reasoning, but detailed study of his data + the way he uses them. That is a time consuming job. None of us did that for M. until far too late. I must accept primary responsibility for this error of omission. I don’t want to see you put in a position where your conscience will force you to spend weeks in making good the guarantee you suggest.

You know that I am grieved to write as I do. To me it seems that you are letting admiration for Milton’s technical proficiencies + personal liking warp your judgment. Loyalty to the aims we both cherish requires me to be candid, though at cost to your feelings as well as mine. If you can produce genuine evidence that my present opinions are wrong, I shall be glad. In the meantime, please do your best to give proper weight to my misgivings.

[…]

Ever yours

[signed]

Wesley C. Mitchell

 

Source: Arthur F. Burns Papers at the Economists’ Papers Archives. Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Library. Box 2, Folder “Correspondence: Wesley Clair Mitchell 1911-1945”.

Image Source: Columbia 250 Website:  Arthur F. Burns,  Milton Friedman. Foundation for the Study of Cycles Website: Wesley Clair Mitchell.

Categories
Chicago Economists

Chicago. Simons urges the recruitment of Milton Friedman, 1945

Simons

 

 

The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was less than two weeks history and the declaration of the surrender of Imperial Japan only five days old. Nothing says “back to business as usual” at the university better than active lobbying on behalf of one’s preferred candidate for an upcoming vacancy, as we see in the following memo for the 33 year old Milton Friedman written by Henry C. Simons to the Chicago economics department chair, Simeon E. Leland. The copy of this memo comes from the President’s Office at the University of Chicago. Simons’ grand strategy was to seamlessly replace the triad Lange-Knight-Mints with his own dream team of Friedman-Stigler-Hart. He feared that outsiders to the department might be tempted to appoint some convex combination of New Dealer Rexford Tugwell and trust-bustin’ George W. Stocking Sr., economists of the institutional persuasion who were swimming on the edges of the mainstream of the time.

Economics in the Rear-view Mirror also has transcribed excerpts from an earlier 77 page (!) memorandum (10 April, 1945) to President Robert M. Hutchins from Simeon E. Leland entitled “Postwar Plans of the Department of Economics–A Wide Variety of Observations and Suggestions All Intended To Be Helpful in Improving the State of the University”.

____________________________

 

Henry C. Simons Urges his Department Chair to Recruit Milton Friedman

August 20, 1945

To: Simeon E. Leland           Economics

From: Henry C. Simons        Economics

 

If Lange is leaving, we should go after Milton Friedman immediately.

It is a hard choice between Friedman and Stigler. We should tell the administration that we want them both (they would work together excellently, each improving what the other did), Friedman to replace Lange, Stigler to replace Knight and to be with us well ahead of Knight’s retirement. We might also say that we want Hart to replace Mints at Mints’s retirement, and also to be with us in advance, but are happy to have him financed by C.E.D. [Committee for Economic Development] for the present.

Yntema evidently is thinking of getting Friedman shortly. We should exploit this possibility. Milton has now a great yen for a University post and would probably turn down an offer from C.E.D., even at much financial sacrifice, if a good academic post were the alternative (as it might be, at Minnesota or elsewhere). He is rather footloose—not anxious to go back either to the Treasury or to the National Bureau. We should grab him now, offering temporary joint appointment with C.E.D. and full-time, permanent appointment when he is through with C.E.D.

Friedman is young, flexible, and available potentially for a wide variety of assignments. He is a first-rate economic theorist, economic statistician, and mathematical economist, and is intensely interested over the whole range of economic policy. He has been outstanding in every organization where he has worked—here with Henry Schultz, at the National Bureau, at the Treasury, and now recently in the Army project at Columbia. Moreover, he is one of those rare cases of able young men who have enjoyed large experience and responsibility in Washington without being at all disqualified thereby for academic work.

The obvious long-term arrangement is a joint appointment with the Cowles Commission. Marschak would, I’m sure, like to have him; and Milton would like to settle into a major project of empirical research, e.g., on enterprise size and productional efficiency. Bartky may be expected strongly to support the appointment, for its strengthening of the University in statistics. The School of Business could well use Milton, to give its few advanced courses in statistics, if Yntema continues to price himself out of the University. Moreover, Milton probably would be delighted to work partly in the Law School, and be extremely useful there. In the Department, he would be available for statistics, mathematical economics, pure economic theory, taxation, and almost any field where we might need additional courses.

If University officers want outside testimony, they could get it from Randolph Paul or Roy Blough (as regards the Treasury), from Arthur F. Burns (National Bureau), from Abraham Wald, Allen Wallis, and Barky (as regards war research), and from Bunn at Wisconsin (as regards possible usefulness to the Law School)—not to mention George Stigler, Harold Groves, Wesley Mitchell, Simon Kuznets, Erwin Griswold, et al.

Perhaps the best thing about Milton, apart from his technical abilities, is his capacity for working as part of a team. He is the gregarious kind of intellectual, anxious to try out all his ideas on his colleagues and to have them reciprocate. He would doubtless be worth his whole salary, if he neither taught nor published, simply for his contribution to other people’s work and to the Department group as a whole. But he is also intensely interested in teaching, and far too industrious not to publish extensively. Our problem would be not that of finding ways to use him but that of keeping him from trying too many tasks and, especially, of leaving him enough time for his own research.

It would, I think, be good policy and good tactics to submit a major program of appointments, including [Frank W.] Fetter, Friedman, Stigler, Hart, and an economic historian (Innis or Hamilton), in the hope of getting them all within a few years, some on joint appointments with, notably, the Cowles Commission, the Law School, the School of Business (?) and, temporarily, the C.E.D. Research Staff. Such a program would serve to protect us against administration pressure for less good appointments (e.g.,  Stocking [George Ward Stocking, Sr., Ph.D. Columbia, 1925]), and from Hutchins’s alleged complaint that, while he wanted to consider major appointments in economics, the Department simply would not make recommendations. We should, in any case, err on the side of asking for more appointments than we can immediately get. Otherwise, available funds may go largely elsewhere—e.g., into Tugwell-like, lame-duck appointments, and into Industrial Relations, Agricultural Economics, and other ancillary enterprises, at the expense of the central field of economics.

There is, I trust, substantial agreement within the Department, on the men mentioned above. This fact, if fact it is, should be made unmistakably clear to the administration.

Incidentally, if we are going to explore possibilities of an appointment in American economic history (and I’m probably alone in opposing), we should do so only in co-operation with the History Department and with (from the outset) joint plans for joint appointments.

 

HCS-w

 

Source: University of Chicago Archives. Office of the President. Hutchins Administration. Records. Box 73, Folder “Economics Dept., 1943-45”.

Image Source: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-07613, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Categories
Economists Fields Harvard

Harvard. Thirteen Economics Ph.D. Examinees, 1908-09.

 

 

This posting lists the five graduate students in economics who took their subject examinations for the Ph.D. at Harvard from March 12 through May 21, 1908. The examination committee members, academic history, general and specific subjects are provided along with the doctoral thesis subject, when declared. Lists for 1903-04, 1904-05, 1905-06, 1907-08, 1915-16, and 1926-27 were posted previously. In the same archival box one finds lists for the academic years 1902-03 through 1904-05, 1906-07 through 1913-14, 1915-16, 1917-18 through 1918-19, and finally 1926-27. I only include graduate students of economics (i.e. not included are the Ph.D. candidates in history and government).

Titles and dates of Harvard economic dissertations for the period 1875-1926 can be found here.

________________________________________

DIVISION OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
EXAMINATIONS FOR THE DEGREE OF PH.D.

1908-09

Edmund Thornton Miller.

General Examination in Economics, January 7, 1909.
Committee: Professors Bullock (chairman), Taussig, Gay, Sprague, and Mitchell.
Academic History: University of Texas, 1897-1901; Harvard Graduate School, 1902-03, 1907-09; A.B. (University of Texas) 1900; A.M. (ibid) 1901; A.M. (Harvard) 1903. Instructor in Political Science, University of Texas, 1904-; Austin Teaching Fellow (Harvard), 1908-09.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Economic History to 1750. 3. Economic History since 1750. 4. Money, Banking and Transportation. 5. Public Finance and Financial History. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: Public Finance and the Financial History of the United States since 1789.
Thesis Subject: “The Financial History of Texas.” (With Professor Bullock.)

 

Charles Edward Persons.

General Examination in Economics, February 25, 1909.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Carver, Gay, MacDonald, and Ripley.
Academic History: Cornell College (Iowa), 1898-1903; Harvard Graduate School, 1904-05, 1906-09; A.B. (Cornell College) 1903; A.M. (Harvard) 1905. Instructor in Economics at Wellesley College, 1908-.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Economic History to 1750. 3. Economic History from 1750. 4. Sociology and Social Reform. 5. Transportation and Foreign Commerce. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: Industrial History of the United States.
Thesis Subject: “The History of the Ten-Hour Law in Massachusetts.” (With Professor Taussig.)

 

Frank Richardson Mason.

Special Examination in Economics, May 3, 1909.
General Examination passed May 8, 1907.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Bullock, Ripley, Mitchell, and Sprague.
Academic History: Harvard College, 1901-05; Harvard Graduate School, 1905-08; A.B. (Harvard) 1905; A.M. (ibid) 1906. Austin Teaching Fellow (Harvard), 1906-08.
Special Subject: Economic History of the United States.
Thesis Subject: “The Silk Industry in America.” (With Professor Taussig.)
Committee on Thesis: Professors Taussig, Bullock, and Sprague.

 

Robert Franz Foerster.

Special Examination in Economics, May 12, 1909.
General Examination passed May 21, 1908.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Peabody, Carver, Ripley, and Bullock.
Academic History: Harvard College, 1902-05; University of Berlin, 1905-06 (Winter Semester); Harvard Graduate School, 1906-09; A.B. (Harvard) 1906. Assistant in Social Ethics (Harvard), 1908-09.
Special Subject: Labor Problems.
Thesis Subject: “Emigration from Italy, with special reference to the United States.” (With Professor Taussig.)
Committee on Thesis: Professors Taussig, Ripley, and Gay.

 

David Frank Edwards.

General Examination in Economics, May 13, 1909.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Carver, Ripley, MacDonald, Mitchell, and Sprague.
Academic History: Ohio Wesleyan University, 1899-1903; Harvard Graduate School, 1905-06; A. B. (Ohio Wesleyan) 1903; A.M. (Harvard) 1906. Teacher, High School of Commerce (Boston), 1907-.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Labor Problems and Industrial Organization (and Social Reform). 3. Money, Banking, and Commercial Crises. 4. Commercial Geography and Foreign Commerce. 5. Transportation and Foreign Commerce. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: International Trade and Tariff Problems.
Thesis Subject: “The Glass Industry in the United States.” (With Professor Taussig.)

 

Harley Leist Lutz.

General Examination in Economics, May 14, 1909.
Committee: Professors Bullock (chairman), Carver, Gay, MacDonald, and Sprague.
Academic History: Oberlin College, 1904-07; Harvard Graduate School, 1907-09; A. B. (Oberlin) 1907; A.M. (Harvard) 1908. Assistant (Oberlin), 1906-07; Austin Teaching Fellow (Harvard), 1908-09.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Economic History to 1750, with especial reference to England. 3. Sociology and Social Reform. 4. Money, Banking, and Commercial Crises. 5. Public Finance and Financial History. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: Public Finance and Financial History of the United States.
Thesis Subject: “State Control over the Assessment of Property for Local Taxation.” (With Professor Bullock.)

 

Joseph Stancliffe Davis.

General Examination in Economics, May 17, 1909.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Carver, Bullock, Ripley, Mitchell, and Dr. Tozzer.
Academic History: Harvard College, 1904-08; Harvard Graduate School, 1908-09; A. B. (Harvard) 1908; Assistant in Economics (Harvard) 1908-09.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Economic History since 1750. 3. Sociology and Social Progress. 4. Money, Banking, and Industrial Organization. 5. History of American Institutions, especially since 1783. 6. Anthropology, especially Ethnology.
Special Subject: Corporations (Industrial Organization).
Thesis Subject: “The Policy of New Jersey toward Business Corporations.” (With Professor Bullock.)

 

James Ford.

Special Examination in Economics, May 19, 1909.
General Examination passed May 16, 1906.
Committee: Professors Carver (chairman), Peabody, Ripley, Taussig, and Bullock.
Academic History: Harvard College, 1901-04; Harvard Graduate School, 1904-06, 1907-09; A.B. (Harvard) 1905; A.M. (ibid) 1906. Robert Treat Paine Travelling Fellow, 1906-07; Assistant, Social Ethics (Harvard), 1907-09.
Special Subject: Social Reform (Socialism, Communism, Anarchism).
Thesis Subject: “Distributive and Productive Coöperative Societies in New England.” (With Professor Carver.)
Committee on Thesis: Professors Carver, Peabody, and Taussig.

 

Edmund Ezra Day.

Special Examination in Economics, May 20, 1909.
General Examination passed May 23, 1907.
Committee: Professors Bullock (chairman), Taussig, Ripley, Munro, and Mr. Parker.
Academic History: Dartmouth College, 1901-06; Harvard Graduate School, 1906-07, 1908-09; S.B. (Dartmouth) 1905; A.M. (ibid) 1906. Instructor in Economics, Dartmouth College, 1907-.
Special Subject: Public Finance and Financial History of the United States since 1789.
Thesis Subject: “The History of the General Property Tax in Massachusetts.” (With Professor Bullock.)
Committee on Thesis: Professors Bullock, Taussig, and Ripley.

 

Clyde Orval Ruggles.

General Examination in Economics, May 20, 1909.
Committee: Professors Ripley (chairman), Carver, Taussig, Gay, and MacDonald.
Academic History: Hedrick Normal School, 1895-96; Iowa State Normal School and Teachers’ College of Iowa, 1901-06; State University of Iowa, 1906-07; Harvard Graduate School, 1907-09; A. B. (Teachers’ College) 1906; A.M. (State Univ.) 1907.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Sociology and Social Reform. 3. Statistics. 4. Economic History to 1750, with especial reference to England. 5. Money, Banking, and Commercial Crises. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: Money and Banking.
Thesis Subject: “The Greenback Movement with especial Reference to Wisconsin and Iowa.” (With Professors Andrew and Mitchell.)

 

Edmund Thornton Miller.

Special Examination in Economics, May 21, 1909.
General Examination passed January 7, 1909.
Committee: Professors Bullock (chairman), Taussig, Mitchell, and Sprague.
Committee on Thesis: Professors Bullock, Taussig, and Mitchell.
(See first item for Academic History etc.)

 

Emil Sauer.

General Examination in Economics, May 21, 1909.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Carver, Gay, Mitchell, Munro, and Ripley.
Academic History: University of Texas, 1900-03, 1904-05; Harvard Graduate School, 1907-09; Litt.B. (University of Texas) 1903; A.M. (Harvard) 1908.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Economic History since 1750. 3. Statistics. 4. Money, Banking, and Commercial Crises. 5. Transportation and Industrial Organization. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: Economic History of the United States.
Thesis Subject: “The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 and the Relations between the United States and Hawaii, 1875-1900.” (With Professor Taussig.)

 

Charles Edward Persons.

Special Examination in Economics, May 24, 1909.
General Examination passed February 25, 1909.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Peabody, Bullock, Ripley, and Sprague.
Committee on Thesis: Professors Taussig, Bullock, and Ripley.
(See second item for Academic History etc.)

 

Carl William Thompson.

General Examination in Economics, June 2, 1909.
Committee: Professors Carver (chairman), Taussig, Sprague, Ripley, Cole, and MacDonald.
Academic History: Valparaiso College, 1899-1901; University of South Dakota, 1902-03; Harvard Graduate School, 1903-04; A.B. (Valparaiso) 1901; B.O. (ibid) 1901; A.B. (South Dakota) 1903; A.M. (ibid.) 1903; A.M. (Harvard) 1904. Professor of Economics and Sociology, University of South Dakota.
General Subjects: 1. Economic Theory and its History. 2. Sociology and Social Reform. 3. Money, Banking, and Commercial Crises. 4. Transportation and Foreign Commerce. 5. Labor Problems and Industrial Organization.. 6. History of American Institutions.
Special Subject: (undecided).
Thesis Subject: (undecided.)

 

Arthur Norman Holcombe.

Special Examination in Economics, June 7, 1909.
General Examination passed April 8, 1907.
Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Ripley, Bullock, Cole, and Munro.
Academic History: Harvard College, 1902-06; Harvard Graduate School, 1906-09; A.B. (Harvard) 1906; Assistant in Economics (Harvard), 1906-07; Rogers Travelling Fellow, 1907-09
Special Subject: Public Service Industries.
Thesis Subject: ”The Telephone Situation.” (with Professor Taussig.)
Committee on Thesis: Professors Taussig, Ripley, and Munro.

 

Source: Harvard University Archives. Harvard University, Examinations for the Ph.D. (HUC 7000.70), Folder “Examinations for the Ph.D. 1908-09”.

Image Source:  Harvard Gate, ca. 1899. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.

Categories
Chicago

Chicago. Soliciting Contributions of Alumni/ae to Fund for Graduate Fellowships, 1931

Scarcely a week goes by for anyone with a Ph.D. these days that does not bring some sort of request for a financial contribution from the one or other alma mater. I can easily imagine that the sort of letter transcribed below from the head of the department of economics at the University of Chicago was still something of a novelty in 1931.

Looking at the list of the former Chicago economics fellows from whom contributions had been requested, I noticed that the first four names are alphabetically arranged, the next four names are likewise alphabetically arranged, the next four names (with one exception) are also so arranged as are the next two and the final three. The facts, that (i) the sample letter (December 16, 1931 to Trevor Arnett) was addressed to the 13th person on the list and (ii) dated only two days before the cover letter to University of Chicago Trustee James Stifler was sent, lead me to conclude that Chairman Millis had a response rate of two for the dozen letters he first sent out. I am somewhat surprised he even sent off his letter to James Stifler before receiving at least one positive response. Maybe Millis was told something like “Why don’t you folks write to some of your earlier fellows and ask for money” and he just wanted to show for the record that he had tried.

___________________________________

 

The University of Chicago
Department of Economics

December 18, 1931

Dr. James M. Stifler
The President’s Office
Faculty Exchange

Dear Mr. Stifler:

I enclose a carbon copy of a letter written to Mr. Arnett, one of the former fellows in Economics, and a list of the seventeen persons to whom such letters were sent. For your information, I may say that to date I have had only two replies, both of them in terms of “I regret.”

Sincerely yours
[signed]
H. A. Millis

 

HAM-W
Encl.

___________________________________

 

December 16, 1931

COPY

 

Mr. Trevor Arnett
General Education Board
61 Broadway
New York City

Dear Mr. Arnett:

I have talked over an idea I have had for some time with a few men who have held fellowships in Economics at the University of Chicago, and, finding a favorable reaction to it, now write you. The idea is this: that those of us who feel so inclined should contribute at our convenience some part of all of the stipend received when fellows to a fund to finance fellowships in Economics at the University. The underlying thought is that there is a good case for those of us who were fortunate enough to have assistance at a crucial time in our training to lend help to others in the generation following us. The need for well trained men is great; many very promising young men and women cannot get the necessary training without some financial aid. Last year, for example, our Department had 175 applications for fellowships and scholarships. Twenty of the applicants for fellowships, and twenty-seven altogether, we graded as A-1, but, with some funds secured from the outside, we were able to grant fellowships to only six of the twenty. From the information I have, it would appear that more than one-half of the remaining fourteen have had to forego entirely or postpone their program of work leading to the doctorate in Economics here or elsewhere. Next year we shall have less fellowship money from the sources available this year.

Do you feel inclined to join some of us in this plan? If you do, will you not write me and state to what extent you wish to contribute and when? In making your decision, you will, of course, keep in mind that there is no desire to exert pressure upon any one, and that there is no thought that a fellowship granted has not been fully earned.

Sincerely yours,
H. A. Millis

HAM-W

 

List of those written:

1. Professor Henry Rand Hatfield Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California
2. Dr. Simon J. McLean Board of Railway Commissioners, Ottawa, Canada
3. George G. Tunell The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, Railway Exchange Building, Chicago, Ill.
4. Professor Henry P. Willis Columbia University, New York City
5. Professor C. A. Arbuthnot Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio
6. Dr. Earl Dean Howard Hart, Schaffner & Marx, 36 South Franklin Street, Chicago, Illinois
7. Professor W. W. Swanson Department of Economics, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
8. Miss Anna Pritchitt Youngman 97 Columbia Heights Post Office, Brooklyn, New York
9. Professor H. G. Moulton The Brookings Institution, 744 Jackson Place, Washington, D.C.
10. Professor W. C. Mitchell c/o D. H. MacGregor, Oxford University, Oxford, England
11. Professor Duncan A. MacGibbon Board of Grain Commissioners, Winnipeg, Canada
12. Professor James A. Moffat University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana
13. Mr. Trevor Arnett General Education Board, 61 Broadway, New York City
14. Professor Stephen B. Leacock McGill University, Montreal, Canada
15. Professor Spurgeon Bell Department of Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
16. Miss Hazel Kyrk University of Chicago, Faculty Exchange
17. Professor Sumner Slichter School of Business Administration, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

___________________________________

 

[Carbon copy]

December 21, 1931

 

Dear Mr. Millis:

I have received and read with great interest the letter which you sent to Mr. Trevor Arnett. It seems to me to be an excellent letter and I do not see how anybody could object to it.

I fancy that you may receive some further regrets but I hope that there may be a considerable number who will feel that they can fall in with the plan.

Faithfully yours,

James M. Stifler

Mr. H. A. Millis
Department of Economics
Faculty Exchange

___________________________________

 

 

Source: University of Chicago Archives. Office of the President. Hutchins Administration. Records. Box 72, Folder “Economics Dept, 1929-1931”.

Image: Social Science Building, University of Chicago.

 

Categories
Columbia Curriculum Fields

Columbia. J. M. Clark on Teaching “modern tools of economic thinking”, 1942

In my examination of department archives I have been somwhat surprised at the relative scarcity of paper traffic with regard to curriculum reform. Here a short note from Maurice Clark to the executive officer of the economics department (i.e. chairman) Robert M. Haig about Columbia’s hiring strategy and whether two “math. Ec’ist[s]” aren’t enough for the task of teaching the “modern tools of economic thinking.” Looking at the faculty list for that year, I presume Clark meant Harold Hotelling and Abraham Wald. The note sounds as though Clark is looking for a way to get out of the “Current types of economic theory” course that he had taken over from Wesley Clair Mitchell and to teach instead a core theory course again.

_____________________________________

 

COPY

January 9, 1942

Dear Bob [R. M. Haig]:

I heard Lange’s paper. Impressions very favorable per se: but he’s one more high-power mathematical economist, and with three, wouldn’t we be unbalanced? And if it takes a math. Ec’ist to do the job of “modern tools of economic thinking” we had in mind, aren’t two enough?

Another unmatured impression: that part of the gap we’re thinking of would be met by a development and more up-to-date and adequate treatment of the sort of thing I used to do in the course I quit giving when I took Mitchell’s “Types” course:–more specifically, the second half-year where I dealt with the concepts of demand, supply and cost curves in an attempt to relate them to actual behavior. I adumbrated the possibility of treating the distinction between competition and monopoly in terms of slopes of “individual demand schedules” (before Chamberlin’s book). Had ‘em read Foster & Catchings to get the “Income-flow” approach, before Keynes’ books appeared. (I note Neisser of Penn. still finds use for F. & C. in teaching.) Suggested the discrepancy between saving and investment (without, I freely admit, seeing the significances that Keynes developed). And of course I had played with “multipliers”.

A course in which I ruthlessly condensed what used to be my first half-year into two or three lectures, and developed the other kind of material more adequately and systematically, might be considered, while we’re considering things.

Yours,

J. M. Clark

_____________________________________

 

January 13, 1942

Professor John Maurice Clark,
Fayerweather Hall.

Dear Maurice:

Many thanks for your note of January 9th. I am assuming that you have no objection to my showing it to Mitchell, Angell, and Goodrich.

Faithfully yours,

[R.M. Haig]

_____________________________________

January 13, 1942

Memorandum to Professors Angell, Goodrich and Mitchell
from Professor R. M. Haig:

You will be interested in the enclosed comments from Maurice Clark

_____________________________________

 

Source: Columbia University Libraries. Manuscript Collections. Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection. Faculty. Box 2. Folder “Department of Economics—Faculty Beginning January 1, 1944 (sic)”.

Image Source:  John Maurice Clark at The History of Economic Thought Website.

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
Columbia Economists

Columbia. Wholesale Price Indexes. Wesley Clair Mitchell, 1921.

I’m an index number junkie. But this blog is not about me, though it will from time to time reveal my preferences, the perogative of the blogmeister.

The kind folks at FRASER provide us really great material. Here the link to Index Numbers of Wholesale Prices in the United States and Foreign Countries : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 284, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, October 1921. Chart 1 between pages 14 and 15 is to die for!

Aggregation is the game, and Mitchell was his name, Wesley Clair Mitchell.