I. What is a conservative? 523. — II. The influence of the study of economics upon policy views, 524. — III. The cause of professional conservatism, 528. — IV. The scientific effects of conservatism, 530. — V. Concluding remarks, 532.

CHARLES BABBAGE deserves full membership in the club of mathematicians who have made significant contributions to economics, a club which began with Daniel Bernoulli (1738) and reaches at least to John von Neumann (1944). It is appropriate that Babbage's contributions were wholly nonmathematical, for his talents were richly varied and his behavior wonderfully eccentric. The invention of those ancestors of the modern computer, the Difference Machine and the Analytical Machine, is of course his greatest claim to fame: they are prodigies of both theoretical creativity and mechanical implementation. The Difference Machine was designed to produce and print mathematical tables by the use of finite differences. By 1822 Babbage had a small working model and was promising soon to produce logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes. In building a large machine-which continually grew in power and complexity-he encountered and overcame innumerable analytical and mechanical problems. The work on the machine ground to a halt about 1832, after the Treasury refused to add to its previous grants of E12,000. Soon Babbage turned to the Analytical Machine, which consisted of two parts:

Journal Article Archibald versus Chicago Get access George J. Stigler George J. Stigler Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 30, Issue 1, February 1963, Pages 63–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296032 Published: 01 February 1963

Journal Article Stuart Wood and the Marginal Productivity Theory Get access George J. Stigler George J. Stigler Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 61, Issue 4, August 1947, Pages 640–649, https://doi.org/10.2307/1885053 Published: 01 August 1947

The fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years. The question is: Is this fact in fact a fact? Despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact, it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis, presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries, nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis.' Gerald H. Kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections, but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential. In the following pages I propose to (1) reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment, (2) argue that, contrary to Kramer, fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects, and (3) present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections.

Harvey Leibenstein called attention in an influential article (1966) to a source of economic inefficiency which was given the awful name of X[in]efficiency. He cited studies in which misallocations of resources due to monopoly or tariffs had trifling social costs, whereas simple failure to attain the production frontier apparently led to social losses of a vastly greater magnitude. I propose to argue that this type of inefficiency can usefully be assimilated into the traditional theory of allocative inefficiency. It is a question (to be discussed below) whether one ascribes failures to reach the ultimate limits of output from given inputs in any state of technology to inadequacy of knowledge alone, or adds also inadequate motivation. Leibenstein (1966) separates the two: