Knowledge that Transforms

G ERMANY iS in the headlines, not because of super performance but rather because it seems to be on the ropes. Inflation fighting, once again, is taking its toll on growth in Germany and in all of Europe; the instant integration project for East Germany has translated into massive unemployment there and an extraordinary financial cost to come for a decade or more in the West. Prospects for an integrated Europe, with a common money and fully integrated markets and joint policies are moving off the screen. If there ever was a miracle, today one is badly needed. The complacent, self-satisfied, overweight, and overpaid Germany is not coping well with the challenges. The timely and important book by Giersch, Paque, and Schmieding fills a gap in the economic history of West Germany (at least in the English language) and it does so in a thoroughly professional and substantial way.' The authors have set for themselves two tasks, to provide an account of events and to lay out a set of explanatory economic hypotheses in the tradition of free market economics. They provide an almost blow-by-blow account of events and trends, and a record of opinions to document where Germany came from and where it went. The book is fully successful in this objective and thus deserves attention from students of German economic history. Curiously the authors explicitly exclude economic historians from their readership and invite the interest of applied economists; let no student of economic history be put off by this unjustified exclusion. The book comments on German postwar economic events in a chronological fashion. A rundown of the chapter titles will give an immediate impression of postwar history, the issues, and the authors' angst: stylized facts 1945-90; 1945-48: establishing a liberal order; 1948-60: spontaneous growth; 1960-73: toward managed growth; 1973-90: facing the slowdown; two cheers for German unification; a new miracle? No question, as a record this book is superb. The most interesting part is the account of the immediate postwar reconstruction, including monetary reform and decontrol. This is where the miracle happened most conspicuously as Henry Wallich (1955) described so well. The bold write-down of the monetary overhang is just one of the reforms of the time that would have been instructive for the Soviet Union in the past few years. In this context one cannot pass up recounting the Allied reaction to price liberalization in Germany. The turnaround of Germany in 1948 was nothing short of a miracle. From one day to the next, productive forces were unleashed to let recovery and growth proceed at breakneck speed. The move from a socialist control economy to the free market was bold. One Sunday in 1948, while the Allied supervisors were not watching, Economics minister Erhard lifted summarily all price controls. Jossleyn Hennessy (1964, p. 5) reports how it all started:

T HIS BOOK is a big, ambitious undertaking, organized in 31 long chapters covering subjects which range from religion and civilization in economic life to money, banking, wages, and incentives. But, as the title suggests, it is essentially a research tool. It is meant not so much to be and reviewed as to be The test is whether people end up coming back to it more and more or less and less as time goes on. Judging from those areas of economics and sociology in which I have worked, I would predict people will return to The Handbook of Economic Sociology more and more. The chapter by Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly on labor market structures, the area I know best, is the most comprehensive review of the subject; it handles with rare sophistication, material drawn from across the social sciences. The essay by Alejandro Portes on the informal sector and that by Ivan Light and Stavros Karageorgis on the ethnic economy also consolidate areas of study dispersed over the literature of a variety of different disciplines. But I doubt that any single person is in a well-informed position to pass judgment on all of the essays in the volume. Nonetheless, the publication of a book like this provides an occasion to reflect upon the field of scholarly endeavor, to consider what it represents as a complement to conventional economics and, possibly, as an alternative. For this, it seems reasonable to the text, or at least peruse it, chapter by chapter. The first thing to be said about approaching The Handbook of Economic Sociology in that way is that it is a true handbook: The editors, Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, provide very little guidance on how it might be read as opposed to referred to. It has no real introduction. It invites readers to pick out chapters at random, following their own inclinations. This, moreover, turns out to be a very frustrating experience. It leaves one wondering what economic sociology is, or even, what economics is that economic sociology is not. Absent some other guide, one seems forced back to basic definitions. In introductory economics-at least when I teach it-we offer two of these. One defines economics broadly as the study of how people employ scarce resources and distribute them over time and among competing demands (Paul Samuelson 1961). The other is much narrower and more focused:

T WO HUNDRED and seventeen years after Adam Smith's publication, An Inquiry Into Wealth of Nations, comes Partha Dasgupta's An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, which apparently is intended to be equally broad-ranging. Smith identified two forces that regulated level of per caput consumption in any nation, first being the skill, dexterity and judgment with which its labor is generally applied, and second being the proportion between number of those who employed in useful labour and that of those who not so employed. He distinguished sharply between savage nations of hunters and fishers from civilized and thriving nations. Although in former every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour, most are so miserably poor, that from mere want, they frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to necessity of sometimes destroying and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger or to be devoured by wild beasts (Smith 1937, pp. lviilviii). In contrast, in latter nations,

THIRTY YEARS AGO, when Koopmans began to be well known as an economist, he seemed to be a foreigner in a field where his approach to problems was often so different from the prevailing ones. Today a large group of young economists follows his path to scientific discovery. In this respect the book under review is particularly interesting. Not only does it serve as an easy access to articles that appeared in a large number of journals, but it also gives to the careful reader an opportunity to understand the true personality of Tjalling Koopmans, the scientist, and, beyond him, the methodology of modern economics.

An evaluation and commemoration of two pioneering American economists one century after their deaths in 1897. Biographical sketches are followed by expositions and assessments of their contributions to economics. Areas covered include distribution theory, the explanation of poverty, George's single-tax proposal, the business cycle, and money and statistics. A novel interpretation of George's treatment of rent is provided. Also covered are the parallels and antagonisms between George and Walker, and the uneasy relationship between George and the academic economists of the era. An appendix provides a brief guide to the literature.

British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 makes a big leap forward in our understanding of the long-run performance of what became the leading nineteenth-century economy and the workshop of the world. It does so by implementing a giant quantitative enterprise, one that will make it the standard data source for studying the evolution of the British economy for decades to come. (JEL C82, D31, E23, I31, I32, N13, N33)

A SPATE OF economic literature appeared in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties as the advanced nations' governments and economists turned their attention to the so-called developing nations. A recent survey of subsequent contributions to the theory and practice of reveals less that is new and important. Meanwhile poverty persists in the less developed countries (LDCs). And economists are realizing that several social sciences are involved. What else has been discovered or relearned during the decade of development now drawing to its close?'

PHE PURPOSE OF this paper is to examine Hicks's contribution to macroeconomic theory in those respects in which it constitutes a response to, or a development of, the work of John Maynard Keynes. Thus, while it is narrower in scope than an attempt to assess Hicks's contribution to macroeconomic theory, it is broader in scope than an attempt to see Hicks as Keynes's interpreter: for an interpreter is judged only by the faithfulness with which he translates the material given to him; he is not required to extend, recast, criticize, or reconstruct that material. We shall be concerned, then, with what Hicks got out of Keynes's writings and what he did with it; not with what was really there. I therefore shall not be concerned with the authenticity or doctrinal purity of Hicks's Keynesianism. In considering Hicks's contribution to I shall be concerned with two distinct but related matters. First, I shall be concerned, in Sections II and III, with Hicks's response to-and in particular his criticisms of-what himself actually wrote. Also, however, I shall, in Section IV, be concerned with Hicks's contribution to those ideas that eventually entered the public domain as economics, quite irrespective of whether those ideas accurately reflect what may or may not have had in mind at some crucial juncture of his career. I should emphasize that these two concerns are intended to consist simply of a narrower and a broader one: they do not involve a contrast between a profound and intellectually challenging of Keynes on the one hand, to be set against a vulgar and degenerate Economics on the other. Accordingly, I shall be using the term Keynesian in a robust sense; I use it in full recognition of the possibility of diverse shades of opinion, and of extreme or borderline cases, on the understanding that it is what all these have in common that is important.