Observation and observing in economics Harro Maas and Mary S. Morgan -- The space of observation Cunning observation: US agricultural statistics in the time of laissez-faire Emmanuel Didier -- Economic observation and measurement in Russia before 1917: surveying typicalities and sampling totalities Vincent Barnett -- The economist as surveyor: physiocracy in the fields Loïc Charles and Christine Théré -- The fragile dynamics of trust Making variety simple : agricultural economists in southern Italy, 1906-9 Federico D'Onofrio -- Observations in a hostile environment: Morgenstern on the accuracy of economic observations Marcel Boumans -- Observing attitudes, intentions, and expectations (1945-73) José M. Edwards -- Navigating the shoals of self-reporting: data collection in US expenditure surveys since 1920 Thomas A. Stapleford -- Relocating vision Field, undercover, and participant observers in US labor economics: 1900-1930 Malcolm Rutherford -- Observation through fiction: Frank Norris and E. M Forster Craufurd D. Goodwin -- Observing shocks Pedro Garcia Duarte and Kevin D. Hoover
Recently, I participated in the thesis defense on an eminently local subject, political economic writing in the eighteenth century in the cantons of Vaud (where I live and teach) and Berne (which at the time had occupied the Canton of Vaud) in Switzerland. I will spare you the details of this 700-pages-thick thesis, with an appendix of another 200 pages, which was not even about political economic writing in all of the Swiss Federation, but only in these two small regions in one of the most beautiful spots of Europe. But I became mesmerized by the profoundness of the political economic thinking of a group of now largely forgotten administrators and members of the Swiss socio-economic elite that grappled with questions of how to position their economic doings against a Europe that was plagued by the early eighteenth-century War of Succession, questions about the economic consequences not of population growth but of population decline, and the consequences of what David Hume has characterized so well as the "Jealousy of Trade" between the emerging European colonial empires. More in particular, these local men of politics and power were concerned with if and how they could preserve the agricultural system of common pastures—that were to figure prominently in Elinor Ostrom's early studies of the "commons"—or whether they should copy the English model of enclosures that seemed to promise agricultural innovation and economic growth. How would this pan out for the means of existence of the local population? And, of course, what would this mean for their own economic and political interests and standing? All these concerns brought them in conversation with the work of such writers as François Forbonnais, Richard Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and Scottish philosophers such as Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith, with some of whom they were also in correspondence. The measures the local elites implemented on the basis of these discussions were consequential for such important issues as land use, manufacture and commerce, and poor relief. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the thesis was supervised by one of Istvan Hont's students, Béla Kapossy, a professor in the history department of the University of Lausanne.
Abstract It is well known that Marshall had great difficulty in organizing his work after the Principles. The promised second volume never came, and for the books that eventually were published, Industry and Trade (1919) and Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923), Marshall was at pains to find the right mode of expression for his research. In the introduction to the Principles, Marshall had explained his reliance on partial equilibrium analysis and, more generally, ceteris paribus reasoning as the natural method of the economist, for which his method of diagrams was an excellent fit. But already while working on his Principles Marshall had moved closer to economic history. In a letter of June 1879 to Jevons, he had praised Jevons's statistical work as an important step in "'real'-ising" the abstract theories of economists, in which he promised to follow suit. However, while Jevons tried to flesh out mathematical relations that captured the economic causalities hidden in statistical data, Marshall started to explore a different strategy, a strategy that explains his criticism of "mathematico-statistics" and the waning away of his initial enthusiasm for the method of diagrams as an engine of discovery. Instead of relying on the ceteris paribus method, which would examine one causal factor at a time, Marshall searched for an approach that captured the causalities in the economy as an encompassing whole. A shorthand for this approach is his famous epigraph to Industry and Trade: "The many in the one, the one in the many." Moving away from the opposition between abstract theory and economic facts, Marshall tried to develop a strategy that mediates between the generic categories of the economist and the specific events of history that are the domain of the economic historian. In contrast with the ceteris paribus strategy Marshall embraced in his Principles, in which an incomplete analysis is improved by adding causal factors, Marshall explored what this article calls a narrative strategy, in which he tried to work out how to integrate a manifold of heterogeneous causal factors into a unified whole, thus providing causal coherence to a complete chronology of events. The purpose of my contribution to this issue is to explore the development and substance of this narrative strategy. This article will use Jevons's and Marshall's different cartographies of time as an entry point to understand Marshall's narrative take on the causal explanation of the facts of history.
At the end of the 1950s, resource economists developed a method to derive demand functions for recreation sites from travel cost data for recreation planning purposes. Based on this work, a second, direct method of measurement was developed in the early sixties that became known as the contingent valuation method. Initially, this method asked respondents directly about their willingness to pay for a realistically described recreational amenity. When contingent valuation became used for valuation studies of environmental and health issues in a regulatory and legal framework, initial support for the method from resource and mainstream economists faded away, leading to a split in the profession between those who considered the method fit for this second purpose and those who considered this second use inappropriate and politically charged. Because much of this history has been told, including in this journal, the emphasis here is on the relation between indirect and direct inference pertaining to both methods, and the challenges that contingent valuation, as a method of direct inference, poses to the quality of a questionnaire and the possibilities of educating respondents in making a reasoned choice for the amenity on offer.
This article examines and compares three grids that were designed to serve explicit moral accounting goals: the calculation and improvement of character. The examples are tables which fall under a broad definition of diagrams. The examples follow another in time, but it is not the article's intention to suggest a historical lineage between them. Rather, it is the intention to clarify the interplay between grids and the precepts or keys to their use. The first case is the so-called ledger of merit and demerit that was propagated by Yuan Huang, a scholar and bureaucrat of the late Ming-period, who recommended its use for moral improvement in four letters to his son, of which the most famous letter was on the improvement of one's own fate. The second is Benjamin Franklin's Art of Virtue, which Franklin in his autobiographical letter to his son equally described as a tool of moral improvement. The third is the so-called moral thermometer, or biometer, a tool developed by the French revolutionary and pedagogical innovator Marc-Antoine Jullien, who described this tool as a moral mirror and compass that would be especially of use in preparing and educating adolescents for their adult lives. All three represent generic methods of producing knowledge about an individual's (moral) character, knowledge on which the users of these tables could act. Their differences have to do with the perceived relation of moral conduct to other spheres of life, religious, social, and economic, or all of these combined, but also with the different precepts to their use.
This essay examines the importance of an accounting culture for the rise of marginalism in Victorian England. I trace the use of accounting tools in family and private life to fend off uncertainties in the market and to enhance moral control of the self, examining the use of diaristic accounting for two Victorians, George Eliot and William Stanley Jevons, in more detail. The philosopher of mind Alexander Bain recommended the use of mercantile accounting tools, Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra in particular, to harness the mind against emotional and myopic decision making. Bain's recommendation was critically tested by Eliot in Middlemarch and used by Jevons to naturalize the mind's balancing of pleasures and pains as an algebra of feelings. Washing out all differences between reason and emotion, Jevons's theory of pleasure and pain became foundational for the economists' theory of utility. Contemporary critics of rational choice theory take this naturalized image of the economic agent as its bogeyman, ignoring the social infrastructure that brought this agent, thinking as a merchant, into existence. The idea that we calculate captures a sociohistorical reality, rather than a physiological or psychological fact.
Scholarship on the American Slave South generally agrees that John Eliot Cairnes'sThe Slave Powerprovided a highly biased interpretation of the functioning and long-term viability of the southern slave economy. Published shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, its partisanship is partly attributed to its clearly stated goal to shift British support from the secession states to the states of the Union. Thus, it is generally agreed, Cairnes sifted his sources to obtain the desired outcome. A more balanced use of the sources at his possession would have provided a very different outcome. This paper will challenge this general assessment of Cairnes's book by examining in some detail two of Cairnes's most important sources: Frederic Law Olmsted's travelogues on the American Slave South and James D. B. De Bow's compilation of statistical data and essays in hisIndustrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States(1852–53). By contrasting De Bow's use of statistical evidence with Olmsted's travelogues, my final purpose is to question the weight of evidence on the American Slave South. Cairnes aimed, I will argue, much more to balance the evidence than is generally acknowledged, but it is misleading to think that balancing a wide range of evidence washes out bias if this evidence itself is politically skewed, as is the rule rather than the exception.
This article examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called the "middle of the road" to—seemingly—stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the 1940s to come over to Chicago, which Schultz persistently repeated over three years and despite strong Chicago faculty resistance. A contrast between Schultz's own experiences as an economic expert at Iowa State, Samuelson's work as an external consultant for the National Resources Planning Board during the Second World War, and the firm support of the MIT administration for Samuelson's research serves to pinpoint the meaning of being technical for Samuelson, and the relation of the technical economic expert to the realm of politics.
This paper examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called 'the middle of the road' to – seemingly – stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the 1940s to come over to Chicago, which Schultz persistently repeated over a period of three years and despite strong Chicago faculty resistance. A contrast between Schultz's own experiences as an economic expert at Iowa State, Samuelson's work as an external consultant for the National Resources Planning Board during the Second World War and the firm support of the MIT administration for Samuelson's research, serve to pinpoint the meaning of being technical for Samuelson, and the relation of the technical economic expert to the realm of politics.
