TAILIEUCHUNG - A Companion to the History of Economic Thought - Chapter 15

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N American Economics to 1900 To judge by the distribution of Nobel Prizes in economics over the past three decades or so, it would appear that American economics – for good or ill – has come to occupy a position of world preeminence. This has not always been so. | CHAPTER FIFTEEN American Economics to 1900 William J. Barber Introduction To judge by the distribution of Nobel Prizes in economics over the past three decades or so it would appear that American economics - for good or ill - has come to occupy a position of world preeminence. This has not always been so. To the contrary if we roll the clock back to consider the state of the art during the first century of the nation s existence the United States was largely on the periphery of major intellectual developments in the discipline. Indeed when the country s centennial was celebrated in 1876 American economists had an inferiority complex. Writing on this occasion Harvard s Charles F. Dunbar - the first American to be accorded the title of Professor of Political Economy -observed that American scholarship as yet had contributed nothing to fundamental economic knowledge. In his reading American economics to date had been derivative stagnant and sterile. He further held that most of the domestic restatements of doctrines formulated abroad were flawed Dunbar 1876 pp. 124-54 . Foreign observers tended to echo this appraisal. The question thus needed to be asked What could account for the backwardness of American intellectual achievement in this discipline Numerous answers to this question were offered and each identified a pertinent aspect of the national reality. Creative intellectual production it was suggested should not be expected in an environment in which the challenge of taming a vast continent was the primary claimant on energies. Do-ers in other words should not be expected to be thinkers. The abundant resource endowment so welcome in other respects might also account for an apparent lack of original thinking in political economy. In the absence of perceived scarcity stimuli to provoke hardnosed analyses were blunted. Properties of America s federal system of government might also account for the country s seeming backwardness in economic 232 W. J. Barber .

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