Browsing by Author "Weintraub, ER"

Now showing 1 - 18 of 18

Open Access
Archiving the History of Economics
(Journal of Economic Literature, 1998-12-01) Weintraub, ER; Meardon, SJ; Gayer, T; Banzhaf, HS
Open Access
Game Theory and Cold War Rationality: A Review Essay
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID), 2016-02-23) Weintraub, ER
This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision-making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the post war period. The recent books "The World the Game Theorists Made" by Paul Erickson and "How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind" by Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael Gordin raise a number of complex historical questions about the interconnections among game theory, utility theory, decision-theory, optimization theory, information theory and theories of rational choice. Moreover the contingencies of time, place, and person call into question the usefulness of economists' linear narratives about the autonomous and progressive development of modern economics. The essay finally reflects on the challenges that these issues present for historians of recent economics.
Open Access
Joan Robinson's Critique of Equilibrium: An Appraisal
(American Economic Review, 1985-05) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
John Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury: Four Short Talks
(2009) Goodwin, C; Weintraub, ER; Hoover, KD; Caldwell, B
on Keynes in relation to the Bloomsbury Group: I. Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury (Craufurd Goodwin); II. Keynes as Policy Advisor (E. Roy Weintraub); III. Keynes and Economics (Kevin D. Hoover); IV. Keynes and Hayek (Bruce Caldwell). The talks were delivered as part of roundtable discussion on John Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury, the inaugural event of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, and were held in conjunction with Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury, a campus-wide interdisciplinary program surrounding an exhibition of Bloomsbury art at Duke University's Nasher Museum.
Open Access
Keynes' Employment Function
(History of Political Economy, 1974-05) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
Losing equilibrium: On the existence of Abraham Wald’s fixed-point proof of 1935
(History of Political Economy, 2016-12-01) Duppe, T; Weintraub, ER
© 2016 by Duke University Press.In fall 1935, Abraham Wald presented a fixed-point proof of a general equilibrium model to Karl Menger's Mathematical Colloquium in Vienna. Due to limited space, the paper could not be printed in the eighth proceedings of the colloquium (the Ergebnisse) published in spring 1937 but was scheduled for the ninth issue of the series. After the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938, however, Menger's colloquium ended and the proof never appeared in print. Nor did Wald, after he fled to the United States and launched a career in statistics, attempt to circulate his proof. After his sudden death in 1950, only Wald's preliminary proof of 1934 was translated into English for Econometrica. When thus Kenneth J. Arrow, Gérard Debreu, and Lionel McKenzie in 1954 referred in their own fixed-point proofs only to Wald's preliminary published version, his 1935 fixed-point proof was forgotten. This did not change when economists and historians of economics, the authors included, reconstructed Wald's contribution. New evidence, however, proves its existence. This article tells the story of Wald's lost equilibrium proof.
Open Access
Making up history: A comment on Pratten
(Economic Affairs, 2004-09-01) Weintraub, ER
Stephen Pratten's critique of mathematical formalism in the discipline of economics does not provide an adequate definition of formalism and his use of the term bears little resemblance to common mathematical usage. Furthermore, Pratten abuses the history of economics by inventing an imaginary tradition of opposition to formalism among Cambridge economists. © Institute of Economic Affairs 2004.
Open Access
McCarthyism and the Mathematization of Economics
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID), 2016-02-18) Weintraub, ER
Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines – e.g. mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics – during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that this claim is false.
Open Access
Misusing history: A minisymposium
(History of Political Economy, 2005-06-01) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
MIT’s Openness to Jewish Economists
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID), 2013-06-26) Weintraub, ER
MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a collapse – in some places slower, in some places faster – of the barriers to the hiring of Jewish faculty in American colleges and universities. And more than any other elite private or public university, particularly Ivy League universities, MIT welcomed Jewish economists.
Open Access
Negotiating at the boundary: Patinkin vs. Phipps
(History of Political Economy, 2000) Gayer, T; Weintraub, ER
Open Access
ON THE EXISTENCE OF A COMPETITIVE-EQUILIBRIUM - 1930-1954
(JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE, 1983) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
Paul Samuelson's Historiography: More Wag Than Whig
(History of Political Economy, 2016-06) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
Roy F. Harrod and the interwar years
(History of Political Economy, 2005-03-01) Weintraub, ER
Open Access
Sidney Weintraub and American Post Keynesianism: 1938-1970
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-07-21) Weintraub, ER
Sidney Weintraub (1914-1983) was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania. A distinguished economic theorist (and the author’s father), he was a co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, and the leading figure in the US in the early years of the Post Keynesian movement. This article shows how the early development of American Post Keynesianism, despite claims to the contrary by historians of Post Keynesianism, had no connection to the UK group centered around Joan Robinson in Cambridge.
Open Access
Siting the New Economic Science: The Cowles Commission's Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID), 2013-05-01) Düppe, T; Weintraub, ER
In the decades following WWII, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titled Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. Our history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of post-war science in-between National Laboratories and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The conference bore witness to a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques uninterrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics.
Open Access
Tilting at Imaginary Windmills: A Comment on Tyfield
(2009) Giraud, Y; Weintraub, ER
in the inaugural issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, David Tyfield (2008) used some recent discussions about "meaning finitism" to conclude that the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is an intellectually hopeless basis on which to erect an intelligible study of science. In contrast, the authors show that Tyfield's argument rests on some profound misunderstandings of the sociology of scientific knowledge. They show that his mischaracterization of SSK is in fact systematic and is based on lines of argument that themselves are at best incoherent.
Open Access
UNCERTAINTY AND KEYNESIAN REVOLUTION
(HISTORY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1975) Weintraub, ER