Knowledge that Transforms

The list below specifies doctoral degrees conferred by U.S. and Canadian universities during academic year July 2015 to June 2016. Lists of degree recipients and subject classifications are provided by the university. Note: Dissertations without classifications may be found under “Y Miscellaneous Categories.”

GDP, the most fundamental concept of aggregate economics, is often misunderstood and misused. In a brief book, Diane Coyle attempts to demystify and clarify the concept by providing what she calls “an affectionate history.” The product is a lucid and clear presentation that however must come with a caution sign. The story is often incomplete, and what it does contain is not always accurate. Among the salient and controversial topics discussed are the adequacy of GDP for the twenty-first century, the deficiencies of GDP as a measure of welfare, and the strange way in which banking services are calculated. (JEL B22, E01, E23)

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance is a successor to the 1987 work The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Both dictionaries claim descent from Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, published as a summary of the state of economics during the 1890s. The same team of three editors is responsible for both New Palgrave dictionaries,1 and there are many similarities in approach. Indeed, about 20 percent of the essays in the New Palgrave Money and Finance are reprinted from the New Palgrave Economics (and ten essays are reprinted from the original Palgrave). There are also some obvious differences between the two New Palgrave dictionaries. The New Palgrave Economics had a much broader scope, aiming to cover all of modern economics. It was considerably larger than the New Palgrave Money and Finance, with four volumes rather than three, 3500 pages rather than 2500, and almost 2000 essays rather than 1000 or so. The New Palgrave Economics included biographical essays, which took up about a third of the work; the New Palgrave Money and Finance has no biography but includes many short definitions of technical terms. Last but not least, the New Palgrave Economics omitted empirical topics to concentrate on economic theory and history of economic thought, while the New Palgrave Money and Finance covers much empirical material.

I have benefited from comments and criticisms of an earlier draft by Irma Adelman, Peter Balacs, Ronald Dore, Edgar Edwards, Unni Eradi, Michael Faber, Anne Gordon, Keith Griffin, Jill Rubery, Seev Hirsch, Ernest Stern, Frances Stewart, Hugh Stretton, B. R. Virmani, Gordon Winston and Howard Wriggins. To these, and to a research seminar at Queen Elizabeth House, I am very grateful. I am also grateful to the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank and its Director, Mr. Andrew Kamarck, for having provided the facilities and stimulating atmosphere for the early stages of a considerably larger paper, commissioned by Mr. Ernest Stern, of which this paper forms a part. I am grateful to Mr. Stern and the World Bank for permitting me to use the material here.

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,

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?'