HOPE Special Issue Traces Rise and Influence of MIT Economics

As Professor E. Roy Weintraub will tell you, it was there for anyone interested in economics to see.

For all the talk about the University of Chicago and the so-called Chicago school of economics, it was another department — the economics department at MIT — that had really set the course for the discipline in the second half of the 20th century.

“Paul Samuelson. Robert Solow. The Nobel Prizes. The John Bates Clark medalists. The members of the Council of Economic Advisers. When I looked at the major figures in the discipline and the major developments in the discipline’s approach, I saw over and over again MIT,” Weintraub said.

The leading historian of the mathematization of economics and the general equilibrium approach, Weintraub set out to understand just what accounted for MIT’s remarkable rise.

“My project really began with the growth of the Economists’ Papers Project, which came to include the archival materials of a number of MIT economists, and especially with the acquisition of Paul Samuelson’s papers in 2009, which quickly became a magnet for historians of economics,” Weintraub says.

Pretty soon, his colleagues in the department were encouraging him to organize a History of Political Economy (HOPE) conference that would examine just what was behind the MIT phenomenon.

The result was MIT and the Transformation of American Economics, a collection of essays examining the history and rise of the economics department at MIT. Published in 2014 by Duke University Press as a special issue of History of Political Economy, the volume explores the historical, academic, and cultural contexts in which the economics department at MIT was founded and traces the department’s subsequent influence on the development of economics in the postwar period.

The volume sold out of its original print run and has received lots of attention, most notably from Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. Krugman has a Ph.D. from MIT and was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2008.

The volume has also received thoughtful commentaries by David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and economic historian, and Arnold Kling, an MIT Ph.D., in a column written for the Library of Economics and Liberty.

“The success of the volume speaks to the far-reaching impact of the economics department at MIT and the fact that the principal players feel such a part of an important disciplinary movement,” Weintraub said. “After all, it was MIT, not Yale or Harvard or Princeton, that welcomed Jewish economists at a time when most universities had quota systems in place, and it was MIT that made a purposeful effort to admit black students to its Ph.D. program in the early days of affirmative action.”

MIT and the Transformation of American Economics may be ordered from Duke University Press.

— Paul Dudenhefer