Our interviews in the halls of the Mount Washington Hotel, covered the range of opinion about the severity of conflicts of interest in economics: we are alright; economics is no more corrupted than other sciences; corruption is substantial; it is rotten to the core. Scholars who have working relationships, who read the same journals and newspapers, debate in seminars, chat in cocktail parties and testify to Congressional hearings, cannot agree on the status of their science. One explanation is that economists have never thought hard about conflicts of interest and the role that patrons play in knowledge production. There have been plenty of invitations to do so, but all have been rejected. Even economists writing on the economics of science, framing knowledge as an output of a production function, elide the question: if scientists are inputs, who is designing the product?

In the Spring of 1965, Radio Moscow, Havana Radio and Politica magazine of Mexico City revealed the existence of plans by the US Department of Defense, to employ social scientists in information collection and strategy design for counterinsurgency in the Americas. The documented claims forced the White House to promptly cancel Project Camelot. The list of consultants included distinguished sociologists, political scientists, a few psychologists, and two economists: Gordon Tullock and Thomas C. Schelling. The Camelot scandal initiated one of the latest and most significant attempts by social scientists to meet the challenge of compromising patronage. Its lessons are worth reviewing.

The anthropologists led the response. (The principal character, a maladroit recruiter, was an anthropologist.) In letters to the New York Times and in professional newsletters, anthropologists represented Camelot as an example of politics masquerading as science (in their terms “a cover for”, “to cloak”). The collective response would be to tear up the pretense. A Committee on Ethics was set up in 1967 for the jobs of surveillance and public denunciation. However, when in March 1970, the committee publicized the existence of a new Project, centered in Indochina that in all resembled Camelot, the ethics officers were tarred by the membership and the executives of the American Anthropological Association. The identity of the patron was deemed as insufficient reason to cast out as pathological research efforts and scientists. The official conclusion was that ethics should not serve as a criterion to discriminate science from non-science. Also responding to Camelot, the American Sociological Association was far more modest in its efforts, and set a model that has been more enduring. It demanded disclosure of funders and began in the final years of the 1960s the publication of “advisory positions”, while excluding any examination of individual cases. It publicized that sociologists were reflective types, while holding silence over any embarrassing discoveries.

Economists did not respond to Camelot. Over the years there have been multiple attempts within the American Economic Association to start a conversation about ethical standards. A committee existed under that name in 1959-61, with the mandate to examine “plagiarism or questionable practices in using or refusing manuscripts for publication” and was of no consequence and left no descendant. Later, in the 1960s into the 1980s, individual members petitioned the Association to create an ethics committee, the response by the Executive Committee was always the same: no need. Robert Solow concluded for no action in 1981, he now heads the first ever committee charged of producing ethical guidance to the profession. It has set new standards of disclosure, and economists are about to follow the example set by 1960s sociologists. Is (this) ethics what we need?

As a citizen I am interested in the stakes of this controversy, perhaps more so than economists. I want voices that I can trust in the dust of factious debate. I want my taxes to pay for their independence and public service. But as an historian my intuition is that these wishes are both naïve and quaint. The professoriate's extramural commitments are no longer an exception, liable to policing and containment. To open the University was the banner of the labour economist and super-President of the University of California, Clark Kerr, but also of the Free Universities that antagonized his vision. The outcome matched neither design. We have neither the “Multiversity” nor the politically engaged professor, we have an entrepreneur scholar of uncertain loyalties. Historians do not yet understand a research environment where industry and finance, in direct and indirect ways, have become the hegemonic patrons of social science. It is only now coming into view that the ways to social knowledge, the production, certification and use, the public roles it is invited and paid to play, have changed. Perhaps, what my citizen self should be demanding is not ethical economists, but histories that remake my expectations of what are the practices and identities of the dismal scientists.

Great ideas are earned through hardship. It is a conviction that requires no argument, inscribed into our collective consciousness. As I have been writing/researching about Milton Friedman’s popular writings, I was surprised by the (popular) claim that Friedman was for many years an outcast in the economics profession, the proof was that such a respectable place as Duke University refused to carry his books (the specific source was a celebration of Friedman’s life by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek).

Milton and Rose Friedman write in their autobiography Two Lucky People, page 341 in the 1999 edition, of a letter sent to them by Mark Rollinson in 1989, who 30 years earlier had been a student at Duke University,

My years at Duke … were not happy ones. … To make matters worse, most of my fellow students and all of my professors held my views on several subjects in overt disdain.
One day after particularly severe ridicule in an economics class I went to the professor after the session and told him that I was quite certain that I was not stupid and I asked him if there were not at least some economists who shared my views. “Oh yes,” he said “as a matter of fact we’ve discussed you frequently here at the faculty level. You’re nearly a clone of some chap in Chicago named Milton Friedman. It’s truly amazing.”
Well, I went running over to the library with your name in hand, only to find that you were in the name catalogue. On consulting with my professor later, he explained that Duke had a system of screening new material by the appropriate department and the Economics Department did not consider your work worthy of carrying.
Whereupon I went to the Dean of Men … and made an offer: put Friedman into the library or take Marx out; otherwise I would write a letter to the editor of every newspaper I could find.
They opted to add you and keep Marx.
When you received the Nobel Prize, I was prouder probably even than you, as you might imagine.

In many ways this is a fantastic story. Extraordinary because of Rollinson’s report of ridicule by his teachers, remarkable because the faculty discussed the views of an undergraduate student and ranked him with the maturity and depth of the third winner of the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1951, and an accolade held to be more dear than the Nobel). The set of claims is so unlikely that one questions if Rollinson is not a hoax. Was he indeed a student? Yes, he was. The registrar office of Duke University has a record for a Mark Rollinson attending Duke University from 1954-1958 and earning a BA in Economics on 6/2/58, around the exact time implied in his letter to Friedman.

If Rollinson was at Duke then perhaps the rest of the story might be true. Who were the teachers that so freely disabused the views of their students? I could not track down the exact faculty list for 1954-1958, which at the time had economics and business and management together, but there is a picture of the Faculty in 1948 that gives us a sense of who was who. Of those pictured some had left by the mid 1950s (Allen, Haines, MacMilan, Williams), but the two core figures remained, Calvin Bryce Hoover and Joseph Spengler. On Rollinson’s arrival at Duke, Hoover an international economist, and an intellectual force behind the creation of the Office of Strategic Services and later the CIA, was President Elect of the American Economic Association. Spengler was to be President in 1965. On any account both men were Conservatives, and the allusion to Marx trumping Friedman in the Library catalogue suggests a Duke economics that clashes with all oral histories I have heard of the place. There is no record of any Marxist or even a left leaning faculty, and at the height of the McCarthy’s hearings it is unlikely that Duke was a Marxist Commissariat. Duke is Blue, not Red. That said, Hoover and Spengler, as others in the faculty, were raised in the Institutionalist tradition (incidentally so was Friedman) and they might have objected to Friedman’s neoclassical tone. Political conservativeness does not guaranty a liking of Friedman.

What about the claim that the Economics Department was screening Library acquisitions? Asking faculty members and librarians, all were surprised that a academic department would have such influence. The standard procedure was already for the Library to request yearly reading lists from departments, and in addition purchase the bulk of what was produced by the most prominent academic presses. This still left the possibility that Friedman might have been left out.

Libraries apparently are not very good at keeping records, at least not of themselves. Once Duke Libraries moved from the print catalogue to the electronic one any reference to date of acquisition was lost. To discover if Duke held any of Friedman’s books I would have to inspect the acquisitions lists for each year. Or I could just cross my fingers and look at the surviving copies hoping to find a suitably old one.

Three copies of Friedman's Essay in Positive Economics

I found three copies of Friedman’s Essays in Positive Economics in the shelves. Copy numbered 5 was a fifth printing of 1966. copy numbered 6 was the third printing. Copy number 2 was the original 1953 edition.

1953 Essays in Positive Economics

I feel certain that there was plenty of Friedman in the Duke Libraries in 1953-1958. As I noted above, he was a Clark Medalist, and had published widely in the academic journals. He however had not published many books. Besides the collection of items in Essays in Positive Economics, I found only one remaining item from 1945. Friedman would rise to popular stardom only in 1962 with his Capitalism and Freedom, his role as adviser to the Goldwater campaign, and his time as columnist at Newsweek.

Friedman's NBER 1945 study with Kuznets

I am inclined to read Rollinson’s story as a constructed memory. There is contrast between the hold Friedman had on the public imagination, as a representative of the economics profession in the 1970s and 1980s, and the influence he would have had in the economics curriculum of the 1950s. Rollinson might well have read little Friedman as an undergraduate, but read plenty of him later as a consumer of media. His grievances with the Duke faculty were objectified in his sense of loss of Friedman.

Returning to my initial question: Why are stories of intellectual hardship and exclusion so eagerly accepted, even when they are so implausible? What comes out of this record is that these stories are not just stories of the hardship of the intellectual (Friedman) but also stories about the hardship of the public (Rollinson). The public had to battle with Friedman to earn (deserve) his economic insights. Rollinson had to oppose his teachers, the Library, the Dean of Men. Through this narrative of obstacles public knowledge is a labour deserving personal worth.

Note: To anyone reading from the Hoover Institution. I would much value a copy of the 1989 letter of Rollinson to Friedman currently at the Friedman papers, on the chance that an address or other reference in the letter might help me locate the principal. I would much like to contact him.

Asking about the frequency of words “father” “mother” “sister” “brother” “friend”, I got a really nice storyline. Early 19th century it was all about the boys: father and brother, which are nearly twice as frequent as mother and sister; the gospels looming big I am sure. By 1900s the males go on a slow decline. Sister is also in decline, but mothers are up and coming from the early 19th century and overcome father by mid 1960s.

Not my fault that I am a Momma’s Boy, it is just zeitgeist!

Past and Present

DENVER – Perhaps this year the event acquired a name that at last will stick. The World Financial Crisis? The Great Recession? Why not call it The Long Slump, said Robert Hall, of Stanford University, in his presidential address at the meeting here of the American Economic Association.

A slump describes the time that passes, once a recession begins, before employment returns to its normal level – an average since 1948 of jobs for 95.5 percent of the labor force aged 25 to 54. This slump, which began in the autumn of 2007, is expected to last most of a decade, he said, before the unemployment rate returns to its post-World War II trend. By no means as deep as the Great Depression, it would be almost as long.

The most interesting sessions at the meetings this year were those concerned with what has been learned about the sources of the crisis, and about measures that might be taken to prevent it from happening again. It has become a commonplace that economics had grown overspecialized, that macroeconomists, monetary theorists and finance experts had paid too little attention to each others’ work. That plenty of progress had been made in the borderlands was clear. That no consensus as yet exists about what happened was equally apparent. That “they are working on it” is about all that can be said with certainty.

Interesting, too, was the undercurrent to be found in many conversations of interest in the history of economics itself. History of economic thought – or history of science, if you prefer – is a subject that has all but disappeared in the last thirty years as a topic of major research interest or as a subject of courses in top graduate schools – precisely the period of economic triumphalism.

I certainly can’t prove a resurgence of interest in economics past as it bears upon the present, or even document it beyond a few suggestive facts. The history of thought sessions in the meetings proceeded in their customary grooves – a retrospective on the rational expectations assumption fifty years after it was introduced, Irving Fisher’s The Purchasing Power of Money at one hundred.

But there were portents of change in at least one session on “rethinking the core” of graduate education. James Heckman, of the University of Chicago, endorsed the possibility of restoring to the graduate curriculum high-level elective courses in the history of economic thought. “People in the past were smart and they made mistakes and had insights,” he said afterwards. “We have sometimes forgotten the insights and we have sometimes repeated the same mistakes.”

David Laidler, of the University of Western Ontario, among the foremost historians of thought of the present day, noted that since ideas periodically disappear and reappear according to the self-estimate of the times, it might be a disservice to give students the impression that all they needed to know was contained in the pages of a current text.

In fact, in a season in which job offers to economists have returned early to their pre-slump high, the single offer that has generated the most interest in the profession – intended to be pre-emptive, since for most young economists the process only began last week with Denver interviews and subsequent invitations to visit campuses to give job talks – is one that the University of Chicago is said to have made to E. Glen Weyl, a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

A recent Princeton PhD, Weyl has a reputation as a polymath and promising theorist – the most high-profile entrant to economics in many years. But he spent much of the last three years editing several previously unpublished essays by the late Simon Kuznets, an early Nobel laureate, and writing a lengthy introduction to them.

The Chicago offer is said to be a joint one: join Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy in teaching the famous price theory course devised by the late Milton Friedman; and reorganize the department’s history of thought curriculum formerly overseen by the late George Stigler. Other universities, too, have eagerly courted Weyl. There’s not likely to be a determination before late February, but the Chicago offer is potentially an influential one.

Ironically, the University of Amsterdam has announced it is closing its Program in the History and Methodology of Economics. Professors and students alike in one of the three or four top centers in the world are to be tossed onto the market, chief among them Mary Morgan, who also holds a faculty appointment at the London School of Economics, the doyenne of the field, including, as well, Marcel Boumans, John Bryan Davis, Harro Maas and Tiago Mata. If the history of thought is about to begin a comeback in the better universities, at least it will find some easy pickings from Europe’s leading workshop.

Diz-se que o mal da vida pública, e da divida do Estado e do (sempre justificado) pessimismo nacional é o pensamento único. O pensamento único da direita “made in USA” e de conservadorismo fiscal.

Mas há outro, que também diz que é único. O pensamento único da esquerda “produit français” que confunde confronto com critica.

Always ready for some self indulgence, I tried my name. Here is what i got in a the first run:

Here is what I got in the second:

A few changes here and there, but a big slice of “online”, another of “education”, and a black dirty little bar of “politics” in the second run. “Sports” somehow comes up too, maybe another Tiago?

I ask because the point of the online exhibit is to suggest puzzlement:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

What if one tried the tool on someone unmistakable, whose identity could not be disputed? Someone like Santa Claus. Here is what i got (click to enlarge, but come back for the punchline):

Santa compares rather favorably with the elusive “Tiago Mata”, he is a multifaceted fellow of many colours, He is in equal measure: religious, social, bookish, famous, sportive and musical. Sounds like our man, once a bishop, now a globe trotting, chimney acrobat what sings his way into people’s hearts …and books? The books is the one that I am finding hard to piece in.