Categories
Bryn Mawr Columbia Economists Gender Stanford

Columbia. Economics M.A. alumna, Guggenheim Fellow. Katharine Snodgrass, 1918

 

Economics in the Rear-view Mirror has sought from time to time (more accurately, from post to post) to contribute to the cause of documenting the careers of women economists who have historically been kept far from the academic and professional limelight. Scrolling through the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows in economics, I stumbled across Katharine Snodgrass and I figured that she fit the bill. Good enough to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship yet a name unknown to me (and I am hardly sticking my neck out when I hazard a guess that very few economists today would have heard of her). So what became of Katharine Snodgrass, born May 8 or 9, 1893 in Marion, Indiana?

It is a sad story, but instead let us begin with what I have been able to learn about her life and career. 

Her story in the history of economics met a tragic end. Two local newspaper accounts of her suicide on September 25, 1930 (only nine days after her early return from England) complete this post. 

_________________________________

From: Bryn Mawr College Calendar, Register of Alumnae and Former Students (1920), p. 154.

Snodgrass, Katharine. 26 Grove Street, New York City

Prepared by the Shortridge High School, Indianapolis.

Bryn Mawr College

Maria Hopper Sophomore Scholar, 1912-13
Anna Hallowell Memorial Scholar, 1913-14.
A.B. 1915, group, English and French.

A.M., Columbia University in Economics, 1918.

Statistical Work, State Charities Aid Association, New York City, 1915-17

Statistician, War Industries Board, Washington, 1918-19

Research Assistant, Federal Reserve Board, New York City, 1919

_________________________________

From: Membership listing from the American Statistical Association, 1922, p. 27.

Miss Katharine Snodgrass. Research Department, Chemical National Bank, 270 Broadway, New York City.

From: Membership listing from the American Statistical Association, 1922, pp. 56, 60.

 Note: International etc. International Price Indexes. Publications of the American Statistical Association, Vol. XVII. No. 131 (1920-1921).

A New Price Index for Great Britain. Publications of the American Statistical Association, Vol. XVIII. No. 138 (1922-1922).

_________________________________

From: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Katharine Snodgrass, Fellow 1930.

Katharine Snodgrass

Fellow: Awarded 1930

Field of Study: Economics

Competition: US & Canada

As published in the Foundation’s Report for 1929–30:

Snodgrass, Katharine:  Appointed to make a study of the dietary fats of Northern Europe, with particular reference to the displacement of dairy fats by vegetable fats, being a study in the economics of food substitution; tenure, nine months from June 15, 1930.

Education:

Bryn Mawr College, A.B., 1915;
Columbia University, A.M., 1918;
Stanford University, 1928-29.

Employment:

Research Assistant, 1918–19, War Industries Board;
Research Assistant, 1919–22, Federal Reserve Board;
Associate Editor, 1923, New York Journal of Commerce;
Research Associate, 1924–29, Food Research Institute, Stanford University.

Publications:

“Price of Wool and Wool Products,” 1919;
“Copra and Coconut Oil,” 1928;
“Margarine as a Butter Substitute” (in collaboration), 1930.
Articles in Wheat Studies, Stanford University, Food Research Institute.

Source:  John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Katharine Snodgrass, Fellow 1930.

_________________________________

Guggenheim Grant Financed European Research Trip Cut Short

Katharine Snodgrass was listed as outward passenger from Southampton (New York via Cherbourg) on the United States Lines “Leviathan” August 28, 1930 departure. [Not clear was the voyage cancelled, or was she unable to embark.]

Katharine Snodgrass arrived 16 September 1930 in New York from London on the S.S. Minnekahda. Her ship departed London on Sept. 6, 1930.

California “U” Teacher Found Dead in Her Home (sic)

Minneapolis, Sept. 25. (UP)—Katherine Snodgrass, 35, University of California instructor (sic), was found dead today below her open fourth floor window at the university hospital here.
Miss Snodgrass was visiting her sister, Mrs. Margaret Harding, member of the University of Minnesota teaching staff on a leave of absence from the California school [Stanford!].
Miss Snodgrass was suffering from an acute nervous ailment and had been placed in the university hospital for treatment. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

St. Cloud Times. (25, September 1930), p. 17.

Woman Dies in Four-Story Leap

Despondent because of her illness, Miss Katherine Snodgrass, 35-year-old patient at University hospital, leaped to her death from a fourth floor window of the institution early today. The woman, formerly an instructor at the University of California [sic], came here for treatment two weeks ago because a sister is a member of the faculty at the university here. Miss Snodgrass suffered a breakdown while touring Europe.

Attendants saw Miss Snodgrass at 2 a.m. and two hours later, when a nurse again entered her room, she was missing. Search disclosed the body in a court below the window. She had died of a skull fracture.

The Minneapolis Star (25 September 1930), p. 12.

Categories
Harvard Radical Stanford UMass

University of Massachusetts. Hiring a flock of “radical economists”, 1973

 

One wonders what exact path was taken by the following memorandum from the Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for us to find a copy that landed the files of George Stigler at the University of Chicago. Anyhow it is fairly clear that Dean Dean Alfange, Jr. (not a typo, his first name is really “Dean”), a political scientist and then acting department head of the economics department, felt sufficient local push-back for his wholesale acquisition of the cream of academic radical economics that he put together a full paper-defense for the deal, including letters of support by Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith and Stanford’s John Gurley. 

Still, Chicago had no dog in this fight so I am modestly surprised that Stigler would have received and even kept his copy of the memo. I guess without academic gossip, faculty clubs would have one less excuse to serve booze to the senior and junior ranks of academic barflies.

A friend of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror writes:

“The most plausible reason the memo on U Mass hiring found it’s way to Stigler’s files is James Kindahl, a U Mass economist mentioned in the dean’s memo. He was Stigler’s PhD student, friend and co-author.”

____________________________

The U-Mass Dean’s Apologia

University of Massachusetts
Memorandum

Date: February 26, 1973

From: Dean, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences
To: Members of the Department of Economics
Subject: Recruitment

Offers of appointment have now been formally extended to the following persons:

Rank

Effective Date

Term

Robert Coen

Professor

1973

Tenure

Richard Wolff

Associate Professor

1973

Tenure

Samuel Bowles

Professor

1974

Tenure

Richard Edwards

Assistant Professor

1974

3 years

Herbert Gintis

Associate Professor

1974

Tenure

I believe that you have already been notified that offers of appointment have also been extended to Stephen Resnick as Professor with tenure, effective September, 1973, and to Leonard Rapping as Visiting Professor for the Fall semester, 1973-74. The latter offer has been accepted. Earlier, offers were made to, and accepted by, Ronald Oaxaca, Thomas Russell, and Josephine Gordon at the Assistant Professor/Instructor level. An offer to Marilyn Manser as Assistant Professor/Instructor was extended, but has been declined.

If the offers currently outstanding are accepted, I do not think it would be either immodest or inaccurate for me to suggest that this will have been the most successful and effective recruiting year in the history of the department. We will have filled our long standing gaps in macroeconomics and monetary economics with excellent appointments, we will have added some very promising younger economists in applied fields, and we will have brought in a group of “radical” economists who are, by general agreement, the very best representatives of that school of economists in the United States.

I should have thought that these recruiting efforts needed no justification or defense. However, on the day when the five most recent offers listed above were sent out, I received a memorandum from Jim Kindahl suggesting certain reservations about the recruitment of the “radicals,” and asking me to explain my actions to the department. The remainder of this memorandum is written in response to that request.

First of all, it was suggested that the recruitment of the “radical” group was somehow carried on clandestinely. I am left rather puzzled by that because I hardly thought that the matter was a secret. Each of the members of this group visited the campus and spoke openly and frankly with many members of the department. I have also had occasion over the past few months to speak with a substantial number of the members of the department, and I found no one who was unaware of my recruiting intentions. Those members of the department who chose not to discuss personnel matters with me did so despite the fact that I invited discussion of such matters with faculty individually or in groups. Moreover, the question arose in the department meeting in January, and no one present seemed to me to be in the dark. It is true that I made no formal announcement of recruiting plans to the department, but it should be remembered that the department has no personnel committee, that it rejected my desire to establish an advisory committee on personnel matters, and that it certainly has not been the practice in the recent past to publicize and to encourage broad discussion of recruitment plans within the department as a whole.

Second, it was indicated that a substantial number of department members either have reservations regarding, or are definitely opposed to, the recruitment of the “radical” group. I suppose that to be true. The Department of Economics has not been known in the past for its ability to establish a broad consensus on significant personnel matters, and I assume that no meaningful step in any direction could be taken that a substantial number of members of the department would not either have reservations regarding or be opposed to. With knowledge of this circumstance, the department practice in the recent past has been deliberately to ignore this lack of consensus and to move ahead in the direction thought most advisable by the department leadership. While my strongest desire both as Dean and as acting department head is to establish a departmental consensus on fundamental issues, and my hope is that the work of the department head search committee can be an important vehicle in this regard, it nevertheless seems to me necessary, in the short run, to accept the lack of consensus as a given, and not to allow it to bring the development of the department to a standstill.

It was not my original intention to serve this year as acting department head, nor was it my intention to act without a personnel committee. I had hoped to appoint a member of the department to serve as acting head, but Vice-Chancellor Gluckstern prevailed upon me to act in that capacity after some members of last year’s personnel committee persuaded him that that arrangement would be preferable to having an acting head from within the department. The decision not to have a personnel committee was, of course, an action taken by an almost unanimous vote of the department with full knowledge that I would be serving as acting head. Following that vote, I sought to establish an informal advisory committee to assist me on personnel matters, but I abandoned that plan after protests arose within the department that such a committee would be, in effect, a de facto personnel committee, whose establishment would contravene the department vote not to have such a committee. The point is that I did not maneuver myself into the position that I have been in with relation to the Department of Economics this year. Instead, it would be accurate to say that I was maneuvered into it by departmental action. However, having found myself thrust into the position, I resolved to act vigorously in the area of recruitment in order to dispel the possible image of this department as one so riven by internal disagreement that it could not move forward.

It was obvious to me that the previous recruiting posture of the department—that one hired the best economists one could find, irrespective of field, and presumably also irrespective of whether the person hired would want to teach anything that any students would have any interest in taking—was arrant nonsense, and that it would have to be abandoned before it led to the creation of a department so totally out of balance that it would be incapable of, and uninterested in, meeting the needs of both graduate and undergraduate students. At the start of the year, it seemed to me apparent that there were four pressing recruiting needs to be addressed. First, it was necessary to seek to fill the persistent gaps in macroeconomics and monetary economics that had continued to exist despite the report of the visiting committee and despite the urging of many members of the department that special efforts be made to recruit in these areas in order to meet vital teaching needs. Second, it was necessary to strengthen the department in applied fields, where faculty were spread so thin that it was difficult for individuals to find colleagues with whom effectively to interact. Third, it was absolutely essential that the department become sensitive and responsive to the Affirmative Action program of the university, and that a concerted effort be undertaken to identify and recruit qualified female and minority group candidates. Fourth, it seemed to me impossible for the department to continue to remain insensitive to the ferment taking place within the discipline of economics, in which a substantial number of economists—including some of the most prestigious members of the profession—were challenging the dominant neo-classical paradigm, and calling into question the ability of the profession, utilizing that paradigm, adequately to deal with many of the most urgent social problems in the nation and the world. It is hardly for me to argue that the alternative Marxian paradigm of the “radical” economists is sound and potentially fruitful, and to seek to add “radicals” on that premise. However, it is equally inappropriate to seek to exclude the proponents of that paradigm from appointment in the department on the premise that their approach is demonstrably unsound. As James Tobin explained to me, it is not clear whether the “radicals” can devise the tools adequate to the task of coming to grips with the social problems on which they wish to work, but, on the other hand, it is manifest that conventional economists have as yet been unable to devise tools adequate to this task. In the meantime, an increasing number of younger economists and students have been gravitating toward the “radical” paradigm as more relevant and useful. In this context, a healthy department should, in my view, contain some proponents of the “radical” perspective.

My recruiting efforts this year have been focused in each of these four areas. Robert Coen, to whom an offer has now been extended, was identified by the visiting committee as typical of the macroeconomist that we lacked and needed. Thomas Russell, who has accepted a position in monetary economics, was recommended to me, in the strongest terms, by Dwight Jaffee of Princeton, among others. Additional strength in applied fields will be provided by the appointment of Ronald Oaxaca in labor economics and Josephine Gordon in urban economics, both of whom will also broaden the department from the standpoint of Affirmative Action. In the Affirmative Action area, I have, of course, been strongly assisted by the departmental committee that I appointed to identify female and minority group candidates. The work of this committee is by no means done, particularly since our offer to Marilyn Manser has not been accepted, and continued efforts toward the achievement of Affirmative Action goals may still be anticipated.

It is my manner of seeking to meet the fourth department need, however, that appears to have occasioned the controversy to which Jim Kindahl referred in his memorandum. I was, of course, never unaware that the appointment of “radical” economists to the department would be a controversial matter. I decided to proceed to recruit in this area despite this.  My experience with certain personnel issues in the department over the past couple of years, including the question of a visiting appointment for Sam Bowles this year, has satisfied me—although I know that others involved would conscientiously contend for differing interpretations—that what was occurring was a manifestation of what John Kenneth Galbraith described in his AEA presidential address in December as a “new despotism,” which “consists in defining scientific excellence as whatever is closest in belief and method to the scholarly tendency of the people who are already there. This is a pervasive and oppressive thing not the less dangerous for being, in the frequent case, both self-righteous and unconscious.” Because of this, I had no doubt that the department needed to be broadened and balanced in order to reflect more widely the professional views that are held in the discipline at large.

Sam Bowles, who was, of course, on the campus during the Fall semester, if not in the Department of Economics, assisted me in identifying potential appointees. I was immensely gratified when he himself expressed a willingness to be considered for a position, and his interest led to a similar interest on the part of others of the most outstanding “radical” economists in the United States. I had not initially contemplated the recruitment of a group of “radical” economists, as such, but when the quality of the individuals we might be able to attract became apparent to me, it was obvious that an unparalleled opportunity was at hand to make a major step forward in terms of the professional excellence of the department. As one very traditional member of the department said to me, “Who could have thought that persons of this ability would simply drop in our laps?” The idea of hiring a “radical” group was one that I found to have support among a number of prominent economists, and letters I received from two of these—John Kenneth Galbraith and John Gurley—are reproduced and appended to this memorandum. Still another economist of gigantic national reputation—who could certainly not be described as a “radical”—called me on his own initiative to commend me for my insight into the nature of the economics discipline and to praise me for my courage in going forward with my recruiting plans. While I was most flattered by these encomia, I did not feel that I had displayed either insight or courage, simply common sense. I was also equally aware, that, in the light of the intense divisions within the profession, a substantial number of extremely prominent economists might look with disfavor upon the recruitment of a “radical” group, but, as no attempt seems to have been made in the past to follow a course of recruitment that would have support across the spectrum of prominent economists, I was not deterred by that realization from following a course that I looked upon as a means of redressing the imbalance of the past. I sought, however, to insure that recruitment here would take into consideration the fields in which faculty could be most effectively utilized, and, thus, the “radical” group will add to our resources in the following fields in which added strength can readily be justified: economic development, economic history, industrial organization, and the economics of education.

I have spoken about the “radical” recruitment with a variety of members of the department, including some who would not want to be described as among my supporters. There were some expressions of uneasiness about the size of the group because of the fear that it might come to dominate the department and establish its own orthodoxy from which others would dissent only at their peril. Reservations were also expressed about one of the members of the group whose credentials were less conventional that those of the others. But, by and large, I received indications of support as long as standards of professional quality were maintained. I believe that the sentiments and concerns that were expressed to me were sincere and proper. I have tried to heed them. There is no question in my mind but that customary standards of professional quality have not only been met, but have been far surpassed in these cases. Of the four appointments at the two higher ranks, two, from every indication I received, had widespread support within the department and were extraordinarily well recommended by outstanding traditional economists. The third, although less well known to members of the department, received brilliant letters of recommendation and is regarded as a superb economist by those who have worked closely with him. Because of the reservations expressed with regard to the fourth member of the group, his credentials were subjected to exacting scrutiny, and I am fully satisfied that, despite his less conventional background, his, too, is a distinguished appointment. He has had an active and ongoing program of research; his publications have been well received by those who are most familiar with them, and, perhaps most importantly, the evidence is clear and uncontradicted that he is an extraordinary and gifted teacher.

There remains to be discussed the concern that was expressed regarding the establishment of a possible “radical” orthodoxy. I do not see how it would be possible for a relatively small minority of the department to gain control and establish an orthodoxy without my support, and I want to take this opportunity unequivocally to assure all members of the department that I do not intend to permit that to occur. I am committed as a matter of principle to the establishment of a balanced department and to the maintenance of an atmosphere of toleration for differing methodologies so that theorists and applied economists, neo-classicists and “radicals” can work together and flourish undisturbed by fears that their work will be judged, not by its quality, but by whether or not others in the department would do it in the same way. Education, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, becomes merely indoctrination unless students are allowed to be exposed to all approaches and perspectives that are widely held within a discipline, and given the opportunity to select among them. It is my fervent hope that education, in the best sense of that term, can be given to students in economics at this institution.

Now that the offers discussed above have been formally extended on behalf of the university, it remains only for them to be accepted, and I have been led to believe that these acceptances may be expected. Since that is the case, I will suggest to all members of the department who do not share my enthusiasm over the success of this year’s recruitment that, at this stage, accommodations would be far more fruitful than recriminations. The Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts is now “on the map.” We are in a situation in which we can compete far more effectively with the most outstanding departments in the recruitment of faculty. I have been told that there are a sizeable number of graduate students at Harvard who are waiting only for word of the actual appointments of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis before applying for transfer here, and that is only symptomatic of what may safely be expected to be an enormous increase in the number and quality of the applicants for admission to our graduate program. A corresponding increase in the undergraduate interest in our economics may also be anticipated. In short, I believe that if our outstanding offers are accepted, we will have reached the point at which the frustrations and the miseries of the past can at long last be put behind us. I have little doubt that, within a relatively few years, we will deservedly have the reputation of being one of the genuinely outstanding departments of economics in the United States.

[signed]
Dean Alfange, Jr.
Dean, Faculty of Social
and Behavioral Sciences

DA,Jr/jhg

Source:  University of Chicago Archives. George Stigler papers. Box 3, Red Folder “U of C Econ., Miscellaneous”.

____________________________

The U-Mass Dean
Requesting Cover from Galbraith

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts
Amherst 01002

College of Arts and Sciences
Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Office of the Dean

February 2, 1973

Professor John Kenneth Galbraith
Chalet Bergsonne
Gstaad, Switzerland

Dear Professor Galbraith:

I would like to express to you my very deep appreciation for your indirect encouragement of my effort to bring to the Economics faculty of the University of Massachusetts a group of “radical” economists to broaden the base of what has heretofore been an extremely narrowly focused department. I was particularly gratified by the kind words of support that you included in the letter of reference that you sent me on Herb Gintis.

By this time, Sam Bowles will probably have spoken to you about the possibility of your sending me a general letter of support for the appointment of the five-man group that we hope to recruit over the next two years—Steve Resnick and Rick Wolff in 1973, and Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, and Rick Edwards in 1974. So that your memory may be refreshed on the accomplishments of this group, I am enclosing a vita for each of them.

I am now reasonably satisfied that my proposal will be supported at the campus level by the Provost and the Chancellor, and, while I have no reason to expect that any objections will be forthcoming from either President Robert Wood or the Board of Trustees, I believe that a letter from you could be instrumental in persuading people that this is a respectable venture, should any questions be raised in the President’s office or at the Board of Trustees. I have heard, indirectly, that a member of either the Harvard or MIT faculty has already written to President Wood advising him to be cautious in giving his approval to my proposal, and your letter would serve as a vital counterweight to that point of view.

I think it would be most useful if you could address the letter to me, rather than to President Wood, because it would then allow me to present it to him at the most propitious time, but I would certainly bow to your preference on this matter.

Once again, I am deeply appreciative of your support.

Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Dean Alfange, Jr.
Dean, Faculty of Social
and Behavioral Sciences

DA,Jr/smr

 

Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. John Kenneth Galbraith, Personal Papers. Series 5. Harvard University File, 1949-1990. Box 526, Folder “Harvard Dept. of Economics. Discussion of appointments. Outside interests and reorganization, 1972-1973 (1 of 2)”.

____________________________

Galbraith Obliges

John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

February 13, 1973

Dean Dean Alfange, Jr.
Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences
College of Arts and Sciences
South College
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts 01002

Dear Dean Alfange:

I was enormously impressed to hear of the proposed appointments—Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis together with Resnick, Wolff and Edwards—at the University of Massachusetts. I have always been proud of my association with the University—including that of an honorary alumnus—but never more than now. With one step you are putting the Amherst campus in the forefront of progressive economic thought in the United States. And this is at a time when discontent with the established modalities in economics—its divorce from reality, its commitment to small refinement—is notably strong among students, the aware public and within the profession itself.

As you surely know, Bowles and Gintis had the strong backing at Harvard of (with others) Kenneth Arrow, Wassily Leontief and myself—together we are three of the last four presidents of the American Economic Association and the only members of the Department to have held this position. Arrow, of course, is our currently active Nobel Prize winner. I know Renick and Wolff only by reputation—and their impressive vitaes—and Edwards only as one of our younger staff members, but they are all obviously men of interest and promise. All of them are concerned with breaking new ground—with bringing a searching and critical attitude to bear on existing ideas and institutions. At the same time all are committed to a rigorous methodology and all are strong defenders of the civil and tolerant tradition in our university and academic life. These matters seem to me important and especially, perhaps, the commitment to hard, diligent and rigorous work. There has been a dissenting tradition in university life in these last years which would liberate man from both physical and mental toil. These men have no part of such nonsense. And, in the end, it is always the critical, not the routine and sycophantic, work which wins respect and attention.

You will understand why, along with others, I regret that we will not have these scholars at Harvard. (I am especially disappointed about Gintis whose promotion the Department supported and who, I thought, would be ours.) I have found association with members of this group exceedingly agreeable, stimulating and specifically useful in recent years, and my own writing has benefited greatly therefrom. In case this seems like casual praise, may I say that I would personally welcome some opportunity for continued association with the seminar work which these men will be doing at Amherst or—better still—which they might be persuaded to offer at the Boston campus, if that is a practical possibility.

Let me again affirm my admiration for your initiative and congratulate you on your good fortune. As one of the most liberal states in the Union, it seems to me clear that Massachusetts and its University are worthy of each other.

Yours faithfully,
[signed]
John Kenneth Galbraith

JKG: mjh

Source:  Photocopy:  University of Chicago Archives. George Stigler papers. Box 3, Red Folder “U of C Econ., Miscellaneous”.
Carbon copy: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. John Kenneth Galbraith, Personal Papers. Series 5. Harvard University File, 1949-1990. Box 526, Folder “Harvard Dept. of Economics. Discussion of appointments. Outside interests and reorganization, 1972-1973 (1 of 2)”.

____________________________

Handwritten Note in Support of the U-Mass Hiring from Gurley

Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

Department of Economics

January 28, 1973

Dear Dean Alfange:

I have recently heard that the economics department at your university is considering hiring a group of younger economists—Bowles, Gintis, Woolf [sic], Resneck [sic], and Edwards—all of whom have contributed greatly to refashioning economics from its neo-classical form into a social science that has much more relevance to the present-day world. I admire the work of these young economists, some of which has already revolutionized certain areas of economics, and so I hope that they will in fact come to U. of M. as a group. If they do, the economics department there will soon become of the leading ones in the country so far as the younger generation of economists and graduate students are concerned.

I wish you and this undertaking the very best of luck.

Sincerely,
[signed] John G. Gurley
Professor of Economics

Source:  University of Chicago Archives. George Stigler papers. Box 3, Red Folder “U of C Econ., Miscellaneous”.

Image Source: Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis at the Sydney Radical Education Conference,  Copy of “Education for Liberation” by Robert Mackie.

Categories
AEA Berkeley Chicago Cornell Economist Market Economists Johns Hopkins M.I.T. Princeton Stanford Yale

M.I.T. Memo regarding potential hires to interview at AEA Dec meeting, 1965

 

This artifact provides us a glimpse into the demand side of the market for assistant professors of economics in the United States as seen from one of the mid-1960’s peak departments. The chairperson of the M.I.T. economics department at the time, E. Cary Brown, apparently conducted a quick survey of fellow department heads and packed his results into a memo for his colleagues who in one capacity or the other would be attending the annual meeting of the American Economic Association held in New York City in the days following the Christmas holidays of December 1965. The absence of Harvard names in the memo probably only indicates that Brown presumed his colleagues were well aware of any potential candidates coming from farther up the Charles River.

From Brown’s memo, Duncan Foley (Yale) and Miguel Sidrauski (Chicago) ended up on the M.I.T. faculty as assistant professors for the 1966-67 academic year. John Williamson was a visiting assistant professor that year too.

_____________________________

Dating the Memo

The folder label in the M.I.T. archives incorrectly gives the date Dec. 28-30, 1969, where the 1969 has been added in pencil.

Two keys for dating the memo.  Brown’s comment to John Williamson (York): “Wants a semester here, Jan.-June 1967″.  “Solow is hearing paper at meetings” (Conlisk of Stanford) who presented in the invited doctoral dissertation session “The Analysis and Testing of the Asymptotic Behavior of Aggregate Growth Models” (affiliation given as Rice University (Ph.D., Stanford University) where Solow was listed as a discussant. AEA’s 78th Annual Meeting was held in New York City at the end of December 1965.

_____________________________

Memo from E. Cary Brown to M.I.T. faculty going to Dec. 1965 AEA meeting

[Pencil note: “Put in beginning of 1966-7”]

Memorandum Regarding Personnel Interviews in New York

To: Department Members Attending AEA Convention
From: E. C. Brown

University of Chicago

Sidrauski, Miguel (26). International Trade, Monetary Theory, Economic Growth, Mathematical Economics

Thesis—“Studies in the Theory of Growth and Inflation” under Uzawa
References: Harberger, Johnson, Lewis

[He came here a year ago to ask about a short-term appointment before he returned to Argentina. Griliches believes him to be tops. Had him in class myself and he was first rate. Called him on phone last week and he still wants to be had.]

 

Thornber, Edgar H. (24). [H. = Hodson] Econometrics, Mathematical Methods, Computers

Thesis—“A Distributed Lag Model: Bayes vs. Sampling Theory Analyses” under Telser
References: Griliches, Zellner

[Supposed to be equal of Sidrauski. Heavily computer oriented. Doesn’t sound interesting for us, but we should talk to him.]

 

Treadway, Arthur. Mathematical Economist

Thesis on the investment function

[A younger man who, according to Svi [sic], regards himself as the equal of the above. Stronger in mathematics, and very high grades. Wasn’t on market because thesis didn’t appear as completable. Now it seems that it will be and he wants consideration.]

 

Evenson, Robert E. (31). Agricultural Economics and Economic Growth, Public Finance

Thesis—“Contribution of Agricultural Experiment Station Research to Agricultural Production” under Schultz
References: Gale Johnson, Berg

[He is just slightly below the others. Mature and very solid and combines agriculture and economic growth where we need strength.]

 

Gould, John (26).

(Ph.D. in Business School)

[Bud Fackler mentioned him as their best. Uzawa and Griliches are trying to get the Econ. Dept. to hire him. Franco knows him and is after him.]

 

Princeton

Klevorick, Alvin (22). Mathematical Economics, Econometrics, Economic Theory

Thesis: “Mathematical Programming and the Problem of Capital Budgeting under Uncertainty” (Quandt)
References: Baumol, Kuhn

[Apparently the best they have had for some time. Young and very brash.]

 

Monsma, George N. (24). Labor Economics, Economics of Medical Care, Public Finance

Thesis: Supply and Demand for Medical Personnel” (Harbison)
References: Patterson, Machlup

[Dick Lester was high on him. While not a traditional labor economist, he works that field.]

Silber, William L. (23). Monetary Economics, Public Finance, Econometrics

Thesis: “Structure of Interest Rates” (Chandler)
References: Goldfeld, Musgrave, Quandt

[One of their best four. Not sure he sounds like what we want in fields, however.]

 

Grabowski, Henry G. (25). Research and Development, Econometrics, Mathematical Economics

Thesis: “Determinants and Profitability of Industrial Research and Development” (Quandt)
References: Morgenstern, Baumol

[Lester says he is good all around man. His field makes him especially interesting.]

 

Stanford

Conlisk [John]— Economic growth and development

[Arrow has written about him, recommending him highly. His field should be interesting. Solow is hearing paper at meetings.]

 

Bradford [David Frantz]— Public finance

[Has been interviewed up here, but more should see him who wish to.]

 

Yale

Foley [Duncan Karl] (Probably not at meetings. Best Tobin’s had.]

Bryant [Ralph Clement] (Now at Federal Reserve Board. Number 2 for Tobin]

 

York

Williamson, John

[Wants a semester here, Jan.-June 1967. Alan Peacock at meetings.]

 

Johns Hopkins

[Ask Bill Oakland]

 

University of California, Berkeley

[Ask Aaron Gordon or Tibor Scitovsky.]

 

Cornell

Bridge [John L.] — Econometrics, Foreign Trade

Lindert [Peter]— International Economics

[Their two best as indicated in their letter to Department Chairman.]

 

Buffalo

Mathis, E.J. [Ask Mitch Horwitz if it’s worth pursuing.]

 

Columbia U.

[Ask Bill Vickrey]

 

Pittsburgh

Miller, Norman C. (26). International Economics; Money, Macro, Micro and Math Economics

Thesis: “Capital Flows and International Trade Theory” (Whitman)
References: Marina Whitman, Jacob Cohen, Peter Kenen, Graeme Dorrance

[Letter to Evsey Domar from Mark Perlman (Chm.) recommending him to us for further training.]

 

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute Archives and Special Collections. MIT Department of Economics records, Box 1, Folder “AEA Chairmen MEETING—Dec. 28-30, 1969 (sic)”.

Image Sources:  Duncan Foley (left) from his home page. Miguel Sidrauski (right) from the History of Economic Thought website.

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Amherst Barnard Berkeley Brown Chicago Colorado Columbia Cornell Dartmouth Duke Harvard Illinois Indiana Iowa Johns Hopkins Kansas M.I.T. Michigan Michigan State Minnesota Missouri Nebraska North Carolina Northwestern NYU Ohio State Pennsylvania Princeton Radcliffe Rochester Stanford Swarthmore Texas Tufts UCLA Vassar Virginia Washington University Wellesley Williams Wisconsin Yale

U.S. Bureau of Education. Contributions to American Educational History, Herbert B. Adams (ed.), 1887-1903

 

I stumbled across this series while I was preparing the previous post on the political economy questions for the Harvard Examination for Women (1874). I figured it would be handy for me to keep a list of links to the monographs on the history of higher education in 35 of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Maybe this collection will help you too.

Contributions to American Educational History, edited by Herbert B. Adams

  1. The College of William and Mary. Herbert B. Adams (1887)
  2. Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. Herbert B. Adams (1888)
  3. History of Education in North Carolina. Charles L. Smith (1888)
  4. History of Higher Education in South Carolina. C. Meriwether (1889)
  5. Education in Georgia. Charles Edgeworth Jones (1889)
  6. Education in Florida. George Gary Bush (1889)
  7. Higher Education in Wisconsin. William F. Allen and David E. Spencer (1889)
  8. History of Education in Alabama. Willis G. Clark (1890).
  9. History of Federal and State Aid to Higher Education. Frank W. Blackmar (1890)
  10. Higher Education in Indiana. James Albert Woodburn (1891).
  11. Higher Education in Michigan. Andrew C. McLaughlin. (1891)
  12. History of Higher Education in Ohio. George W. Knight and John R. Commons (1891)
  13. History of Higher Education in Massachusetts. George Gary Bush (1891)
  14. The History of Education in Connecticut. Bernard C. Steiner (1893)
  15. The History of Education in Delaware. Lyman P. Powell (1893)
  16. Higher Education in Tennessee. Lucius Salisbury Merriam (1893)
  17. Higher Education in Iowa. Leonard F. Parker (1893)
  18. History of Higher Education in Rhode Island. William Howe Tolman (1894)
  19. History of Education in Maryland. Bernard C. Steiner (1894).
  20. History of Education in Lousiana. Edwin Whitfield Fay (1898).
  21. Higher Education in Missouri. Marshall S. Snow (1898)
  22. History of Education in New Hampshire. George Gary Bush (1898)
  23. History of Education in New Jersey. David Murray (1899).
  24. History of Education in Mississippi. Edward Mayes (1899)
  25. History of Higher Education in Kentucky. Alvin Fayette Lewis (1899)
  26. History of Education in Arkansas. Josiah H. Shinn (1900)
  27. Higher Education in Kansas. Frank W. Blackmar (1900)
  28. The University of the State of New York. History of Higher Education in the State of New York. Sidney Sherwood (1900)
  29. History of Education in Vermont. George Gary Bush (1900)
  30. History of Education in West Virginia. A. R. Whitehill (1902)
  31. The History of Education in Minnesota. John N. Greer (1902)
  32. Education in Nebraska. Howard W. Caldwell (1902)
  33. A History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania. Charles H. Haskins and William I. Hull (1902)
  34. History of Higher Education in Colorado. James Edward Le Rossignol (1903)
  35. History of Higher Education in Texas. J. J. Lane (1903)
  36. History of Higher Education in Maine. Edward W. Hall (1903)

Image Source: Cropped from portrait of Herbert Baxter Adams ca. 1890s. Johns Hopkins University graphic and pictorial collection.

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Columbia. Memo advocating the establishment of an Industrial Relations Section. Wolman, 1944

 

 

The following brief memo written by Leo Wolman was commissioned in 1943 by an informal committee to provide a case for establishing an Industrial Relations Institute at Columbia. Besides identifying the existing centers of industrial relations research and teaching in the U.S. and Canada, Wolman also points to the key role played by “C. J. Hicks, the dean of American industrial relations men, adviser to the Rockefellers on policies and problems in this field and, until his retirement some 15 years ago, the director of labor relations for the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey.”

_____________________

Leo Wolman, Biographical Note

1890, Feb. 24. Born, Baltimore, Md.
1914. Ph.D. in political economy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
1916. Published The Boycott in American Trade Unions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press
1918. Appointed head of section on production statistics, War Industries Board
1919. Attached to American peace mission, Paris, France
1919-1928. Member, faculty, New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.
1920-1931. Director of research, Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union
1920-1934. Editor, Journal of American Statistics Association
circa 1925. Became freelance researcher for the National Bureau of Economic Research, formally joining the staff in 1931 and later becoming director-at-large for research. NBER publications by Leo Wolman.
1931-1958. Professor of economics, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
1933. Appointed to staff of National Recovery Administration
1936. Published Ebb and Flow in American Trade Unionism. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research
1961, Oct. 2. Died, New York, N.Y.

Source: Library of Congress. Leo Wolman Papers. Biographical Note.

_____________________

COPY TO DR. FACKENTHAL

October 23, 1944

Dean George B. Pegram,
201 Low Memorial Library.

Dear Dean Pegram:

I enclose a copy of a statement prepared by Professor Wolman on “Industrial Relations Sections or Departments in American Universities”. This was prepared in compliance with the recommendation made by the informal committee that met last year to consider the possibility of our setting up an Industrial Relations Institute at Columbia. I have had some two dozen copies of this statement mimeographed. These will be available for distribution if you plan to call another meeting to explore this matter further.

Faithfully yours,

_____________________

Industrial Relations Sections or Departments

During the past 15 years, a number of American universities, and one Canadian, have organized sections or departments of industrial relations. The earliest of these was the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University. Since 1930, similar sections have been established at the University of Michigan, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Queens University, Canada. These sections are integral parts of the graduate departments of the several institutions. The moving spirit in initiating and finding financial resources for the sections, already established, was C. J. Hicks, the dean of American industrial relations men, adviser to the Rockefellers on policies and problems in this field and, until his retirement some 15 years ago, the director of labor relations for the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey.

The purposes of this departure were several—to keep members of the faculty and students abreast of the very rapid developments in this important area of private and public policy, to make available to employers, managers, labor, and public officials comparative data as to practices, rules, procedures and policies, to enable students desiring to specialize in labor, labor relations and related subjects to observe and study the practical workings of industrial relations, to push forward the boundaries of knowledge through research, and to establish a closer relation between the scientific activities of universities and the problems of industry, labor, government, and the public. In carrying out these purposes, the various sections have built up libraries of current materials, have published studies dealing with current developments, such as the reemployment of veterans, or of historical importance, such as labor banking in the United States, have trained graduate students, and have held conferences, annual as a rule, for persons working in labor relations.

Depending on their location, age, and industrial environment, the sections now in operation have emphasized different practices. California Technology, operating in a region where large-scale industry is relatively new and personnel men are scarce, has devoted much of its time and resources to bringing to bear the knowledge and experience of other parts of the country on the problems and needs of Southern California. The Massachusetts Institute, operating in an area concerned with unemployment and industrial contraction, has concentrated on research in wages, labor mobility, unemployment, and the like. But all of the sections study, teach, and write about the large issues of private and public policy.

The funds for these enterprises come largely from business, usually in the form of annual contributions pledged for periods of 3 or 5 years. Occasionally a specific piece of research is financed by one of the Foundations but this source of funds has not been counted on for current expenses. Contributions by labor unions have been only a small fraction of total income, though they generally participate in the conferences, and make use of available materials.

There can be little question that the establishment of an industrial relations section at Columbia (associated with the faculties of Political Science and Business) would confer many benefits upon the University. It would make available to students in this field facilities, publications, and contacts with labor and industry which they now lack. It would open up for graduate students new opportunities for employment. It would make available to the university facilities and funds for research. It would create for interested numbers of the faculty, working in the related areas of labor economics, theory, public law, sociology, and labor law, the occasions for using the materials, experience, and problems of industry, labor, and government, not now available to them. It would enable the University to enlarge the range of its public service by serving some of the needs of the enormous and variegated industry, located in this city and the surrounding industrial area of New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York State.

The funds for such an undertaking are probably available in industry. At any rate the other universities had no difficulty raising money. What is needed at Columbia is endorsement of the idea by the faculty, administration, and trustees and the appointment of a small committee instructed to make the plans, raise the funds and find the man capable of directing a section of industrial relations at Columbia.

Leo Wolman

Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection. Faculty. Box 2, Folder “Department of Economics—Faculty. Beginning Jan. 1, 1944”.

Image Source: Detail from a faculty group picture (early 1930’s). Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Columbiana. Department of Economics Collection. Box 9, Folder “Photos”.

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Berkeley Chicago Faculty Regulations Harvard Johns Hopkins M.I.T. Michigan Rochester Stanford Uncategorized Yale

Harvard. Report on the General Examination for an Economics PhD, 1970

 

 

What makes this report on the general examination in the economics PhD program at Harvard particularly valuable is its brief survey of the practice at eight other universities: Yale, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Rochester, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, and Chicago. 

_____________________

DRAFT

This draft is distributed in Professor Chenery’s absence to permit discussion at the next Department meeting, January 27, 1970.
Professor Chenery or other members of The Committee might wish to record further comments in preparation [of] a final report.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02135
January 16, 1970

To: The Department of Economics
From: Committee on Graduate Instruction

REPORT ON THE GENERAL EXAMINATION FOR THE PH.D.

In response to a number of requests from students and faculty, the Committee has reexamined at considerable length the requirements for the General Examination. This report summarizes our general assessment in section I and makes specific recommendations for changes in section II. Some related issues needing further consideration are listed in section III.

Although for the past several years graduate students have criticized various aspects of the generals, the main source of dissatisfaction seems to be with the rigidity of “the system” rather than with any particular aspect of it. We have taken advantage of the fact that the Committee now has three student members to try to understand some of the effects of our present procedures on students’ choices and incentives. We have also tried to strike a better balance between preparation for the general examination and other aspects of a student’s training in his first two years.

As a background for our discussion, the secretary of the Committee compiled a useful summary of the regulations in effect at other leading universities, which is attached.

 

ROLE OF THE GENERAL EXAMINATION

The primary functions [sic] of the General Examination is to evaluate the student’s formal preparation in economics before he proceeds to more advanced phases of teaching and thesis preparation. It also serves as a screening device to weed out weak candidates, as a basis for subsequent recommendations for employers, and as an indirect way of organizing the student’s course work in his first two years. These multiple functions produce much of the debate over requirements at Harvard and elsewhere, since a system that is ideal for one purpose has weaknesses for another.

One of the main criticisms of the existing Harvard system is its psychological impact on the student. The need to satisfy the requirements in all fields within a period of several months inhibits most students from exploring non-required topics until after they have passed the generals. On balance, we are impressed with the desirability of adopting a more flexible timing that will encourage the student to get most of his tool requirements out of the way in the first year and use the second year to explore the fields of his special interest and get some taste of actual research. We have tried to maintain the undoubted benefits of an overall examination, however, as compared to a set of course requirements.

Our survey of other departments shows a significant trend toward breaking down the requirements into separate parts and focusing less on the culminating oral examination. Most departments use the qualifying examination in theory as a device for screening first year students, which also reduces the burden of preparing all fields in the second year. In most departments the minimum proficiency in quantitative techniques and economic history is demonstrated by a satisfactory course grade rather than by inclusions in the general examination. Although we have made our own judgements on these questions, we recommend movement in these directions.

Another consideration which makes greater flexibility desirable is the growing proportion of students who are already well prepared in one or more required fields. For many students, the present system therefore encourages too much review of material they have already covered. We feel that those who are adequately prepared on one of the required fields (theory, quantitative method, history) should have an opportunity to satisfy this requirement in their first year in order to make better use of their time thereafter.

Our recommendations are directed toward achieving greater flexibility in the timing of courses and examinations to allow the student to make more effective use of his time. This should enable many students to get started earlier on their optional fields and to make a better choice of their field of specialization. We do not envision any reduction in the total work done in the first two years or any lowering of standards of performance.

 

SPECIFIC RECOMMENDATIONS

General Principles

  1. The general examination should be separated into four component parts—theory, quantitative method, economic history, and special fields—each of which would be graded separately.
  2. The minimum requirement in quantitative method and economic history should be regarded as a “tool requirement” or “literacy test” as has become the practice in the quantitative field. Students wishing to specialize in these fields may offer them at a higher level as one of their special fields.
  3. The term “general examination” would apply to the oral examination on the special fields. (The question of a general grade on all parts as at present was left open.)
  4. There should be no prescribed timing of the four components, other than the stipulation that the required fields be either completed (or write-off courses in progress) at the time of the oral examination on the special fields. Qualified students would be encouraged to complete one or more requirements in the first year.
  5. Two write-offs should be allowed rather than one.
  6. A subcommittee would be set up for economic history (and retained in theory and quantitative method). The standards and ways of satisfying them in the three required fields should be proposed by the three subcommittees and ratified by the GIC and the Department.

The Theory Requirement

  1. The present coverage (roughly 201a, 201b, 202a) should be retained. The examination would continue to be written.
  2. The examination should be offered two or three times a year. (A straw vote by students showed a preference for June, September and January and a margin for September over January.) Most students would take the examination at the end of their first year—in June or September.

The Quantitative Requirement

  1. The present de facto standard of the written examination should be accepted as the “literacy test”.
  2. The requirement can be met either by the present type of written examination (given twice a year) or by a grade of B+ in 221b or 224a. (It is estimated that roughly 75% would be able to qualify by course examination.)

The Economic History Requirement

  1. The history requirement be made parallel to the quantitative requirement in that:
    1. It can be satisfied by course or special departmental examination.
    2. It can either be offered at a minimum level or at a higher level as a special field.
  2. The minimum requirement would be satisfied by a course grade that would allow a similar proportion to qualify in this way (B+ or A- pending further information).
  3. Alternatives to the present 233 sequence (if any) to be established by the history subcommittee.
  4. Minimum standards in both history and quantitative method could be demonstrated by course examination.

The Requirement in Special Fields

  1. Two special fields would be required as the basis for the oral examination, which would also cover general analytical ability.
  2. Advanced theory, econometrics and economic history would be eligible as special fields, but the first two could not both be included. (In the majority view, one applied field apart from history would be required in order to eliminate the possibility of a candidate offering only the three required fields.)
  3. The candidate would be encouraged (or required?) to submit a research paper to be made part of the subject matter and record of the general examination (He is now “expected” to have presented a paper to a working seminar by the end of his second year.)
  4. The general oral examination would normally be taken at the end of the second year, but could not be taken before the qualifying exams in theory, quantitative and history have been passed (or prospective write-offs are in progress.)

QUESTIONS OF GRADING

  1. Should all examinations be either pass-fail or on a more limited grading scale than at present?
  2. Should the passing standard for the course option in both quantitative methods and history be B+?
  3. Should the four requirements be graded separately or combined (as at present) into an overall grade on the General Examination? (The committee favors first the alternative, but would also require “distinguished” performance in at least one area.)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Examination Requirements at Other Places

Below I summarize examination requirements at eight other places, including Yale, MIT, Hopkins, Rochester, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan and Chicago. The main findings of the survey are:

  1. It appears that the massive type of “generals” (where all fields and theory are combined in one session) has almost disappeared. With the exception of Hopkins, all of the above schools seem to settle the theory examination at the end of the first year, with special fields examined at the end of the second year.
  2. Among the schools surveyed, only Yale has a written examination in history. Hopkins, Stanford, Chicago and Berkeley require a course, with “satisfactory” grade. MIT and Rochester have no requirement.
  3. Only Yale gives a written in quantitative aspect of the generals. All the other schools have course requirements (satisfactory grade) only.
  4. Practices vary with regard to number of special fields and type of examination. MIT and Hopkins require three, the others two special fields. Examinations at Yale are oral, at the other places written, in some cases both written and oral. In most places the special field examinations must be taken together, but in some (Rochester, Chicago) they can be separated. Throughout, these special examinations seem to be given by the department, and not merely as course examination.
  5. Some provisions of special interest:
    1. Chicago and Rochester’s second year research paper as part of general examination
    2. Stanford’s requirement for distinction in at least one field.

 

I. Yale

Comprehensive Examination

  1. Written examination in theory and econometrics, usually August or September after first year.
  2. Written examination on economic history; usually late spring of second year.
  3. Oral examination in two applied fields, chosen from six and in general analytical ability; late spring of second year. Given by four examiners. Student excused from general examination in special field courses at end of second year. Oral examination in theory, history, quantitative or field outside economics may be substituted for one of the applied fields if candidate has done year’s course work in applied field “with sufficient distinction”.

History and Quantitative

  1. History—written, end of second year, and option to substitute for one special field.
  2. Quantitative—written, end of first year, and option to substitute for one special field.

Other requirements

  1. Has apparently been dropped.
  2. One course credit of explicit research training, second year.
  3. Dissertation to be completed in fourth year.

 

II. MIT

General examination

  1. General examination in theory consists of two written papers—micro and macro, given in final exam period of first year. May be substituted for final examinations in theory courses.
  2. General examination normally at end of second year. Consists of:
    1. written examinations on three of 12 special fields. These may include advanced theory, econometrics or economic history.
    2. oral examination in the three fields after written.
    3. a fourth field is required but may be written off by B grade in full year course.

History and Quantitative

  1. History—no requirement. May be a special field.
  2. Quantitative—no generals examination. May be a special field.

Other requirements

  1. Two languages

 

III. Johns Hopkins

First Year Oral Examination

A first year oral examination is given in the spring of the first year, covering the fields in which the student has worked during that year.

Comprehensive Examination

Normally taken in spring of second year. Consists of:

  1. Two written examinations in theory, micro and macro.
  2. Three written examinations in special fields, one of which may be outside economics.
  3. Oral examination: Covers theory, special fields, statistics.

History and Quantitative

  1. History—satisfactory work in course.
  2. Statistics—satisfactory work in course.

Other Requirements

  1. One language.
  2. In addition to the departmental special examination, an examination is given by the graduate board, which includes members of other departments.

 

IV. Rochester

Qualifying Examination

  1. Theory and econometrics courses are required but are not part of Qualifying Examination.
  2. Qualifying Examination taken in May of second year. Consists of
    1. Written examination in two fields. These may include mathematical economics and econometrics. Need not be taken simultaneously.
    2. A second year research paper which is to be presented to a departmental seminar at the end of second year.
    3. After (a) and (b) are met, an oral examination in the special fields.

History and Quantitative

  1. Econometrics and mathematical economics requirements (courses), extent depending on fields.
  2. No history requirement.

Other Requirements

  1. Certain distribution requirement.
  2. Language and mathematics.

 

V. Stanford

Comprehensive Examination

  1. Written in micro and macro theory at end of first year. Cover course materials.
  2. Selection of special fields under two plans:
    1. If no minor subject is taken, student chooses four out of ten fields. These may include history, econometrics, mathematical economics. One field may be outside economics.
    2. Student may choose a minor subject (in another department) and choose only one out of the ten special economics fields.

Comprehensive written examinations for each field scheduled annually, usually at close of course sequence. Must show distinction in at least one field.

History and Quantitative

  1. History—Include at least two courses from offerings in economic history, history of thought, comparative economics, development.
  2. Quantitative—Econometrics course required.

Other Requirements

  1. Language or particular quantitative skills.
  2. Two seminars and research papers.

 

VI. Berkeley

Departmental Examination in Theory

  1. Must be passed by end of first year. Students with strong background take it in November of first term, others in June (end of first year).
  2. Written qualifying examinations given in two out of thirteen special fields at end of second year. Examinations given twice a year, must be taken together.
  3. Within one year after written qualifying examinations are completed, student presents himself for oral, based on prospectus (and interim results) of his thesis. General assessment of competence.

History and Quantitative

  1. Course in economic history at 210 level.
  2. Course in statistics at 240 level.

Other Requirements

  1. No language.

 

VII. Michigan

Preliminary Examination

  1. At end of theory courses in micro and macro, an “augmented examination” is given which serves as preliminary examination in theory.
  2. Two fields of specialization are required. One field is satisfied by satisfactory grades in two courses. For the other field a written preliminary examination is required.
  3. After this, oral examination on research topic and surrounding area.

Economic History and Quantitative

  1. No history requirement.
  2. Course requirement in statistics and econometrics.

Other Requirements

  1. No general language requirement.

 

VIII. Chicago

Preliminary Examination

  1. A “course [sic, “core” probably intended] examination” covering micro and macro theory is given twice a year (separate from course examinations) and is usually taken at end of first or middle of second year.
  2. Two special fields are chosen. Written examinations in these fields, separate from course examinations. Need not be taken together.
  3. Student presents a thesis prospectus before thesis seminar, usually in third year. Must pass on this for candidacy.

History and Quantitative

  1. History course required as part of distribution requirements.
  2. Course work in statistics required.

Other Requirements

  1. Math, no languages.

 

Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. John Kenneth Galbraith Papers. Series 5. Harvard University File, 1949-1990. Box 526. Folder “Harvard University Department of Economics: General Correspondence, 1967-1974 (2 of 3)”.

Image Source: Harvard Class Album, 1946.

Categories
Bryn Mawr Economists Gender Harvard Stanford Tufts

Radcliffe/Harvard. Economics Ph.D. Alumna. Maxine Yaple Sweezy, 1940.

 

In our continuing series of Get-to-Know-an-Economics-Ph.D., we meet a Radcliffe Ph.D. from 1940, Maxine Yaple Sweezy. Her dissertation was on the Nazi economy and incidentally she was the first wife of the American Marxian economist, Paul Sweezy. This post adds a few details about her life (she was a debater at Stanford) and career (minimum wage work). I take particular pride in finding youthful pictures of this economist of yore.

_____________________

Greatest Hit

In his historical retrospective of the concept of “privatization”,  Germà Bel identifies Maxine Yaple Sweezy’s published Radcliffe dissertation, The Structure of the Nazi Economy (1941), as having introduced “reprivatization” into the vocabulary of economic policy.

Source: Bel, Germà. The Coining of “Privatization” and Germany’s National Socialist Party. Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 2006), p 189.

_____________________

Encyclopedia entry

Pack, Spencer J. “Maxine Bernard Yaple Sweezy Woolston” in A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists, Robert W. Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand and Evelyn L. Forget (eds.). Cheltenham UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2000. pp. 472-475

Pack lists the following schools where Maxine Y. Woolston taught: Sarah Lawrence, Tufts, Vassar, Simmons, Haverford, Swarthmore, Wellesley, University of Pennsylvania, University of New Haven, with Bryn Mawr as the longest position.

_____________________

Basic life data

Born. 16 September 1912 [in Missouri].

Source: Social Security Claims Index, 1936-2007.

First marriage: Paul M. Sweezy and Maxine Yaple were married 21 March 1936 in Manhattan, New York.

Source: New York City Department of Records/Municipal Archives. Index to New York City Marriages, 1866-1937.

Second marriage:  to William Jenks Woolston, lawyer (b. 30 Jan. 1908, d. 25 Dec. 1964) [date of marriage: 11 Mar 1944]

Source: Family Tree “Morris, Wells and collateral lines” at ancestry.com, though date of marriage is unsourced there and could not be verified.

Death. 29 April 2004. Last residence: New Haven, Ct.

Source: Social Security Claims Index, 1936-2007.

_____________________

American Economic Association Membership Listing, 1957

Woolston, Maxine Yaple, (Mrs. W. J.), R. 2 Harts Lane, Conshohocken, Pa. (1953) Bryn Mawr Col., lecturer, teach.; b. 1912; A.B., 1934, M.A., 1935, Stanford; Ph.D., 1939, Radcliffe Col. Fields 14bd, 12ab, 2. Doc. Dis. Nazi economic policies. Pub. Economic program for American economy (Vanguard Press, 1938); Structure of Nazi economy (Harvard Univ. Press, 1941); La Economia Nacional Socialista (translation) (Stackpole, 1954). Res. Wages at the turning points. Dir. Amer. Men of Sci. III.

Source:  The American Economic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, Handbook of the American Economic Association (Jul., 1957), p. 329

_____________________

Women’s Debate Team at Stanford

From the 1932 Stanford yearbook page on the Women’s debate team: sometime around the end of February, 1932 Maxine Yaple and Lucile Smith debated with a team from the College of the Pacific the resolution “The United States should enact legislation provided socialized medical service”.

In 1933 a debating section of (male) athletes was assembled and in their second debate (“Resolved, That a separate college for women should be stablished at Stanford”) with Helen Ray and Maxine Yaple constituting the Women’s Team was called a draw.

For the source of the pictures used for this post, see the Image Source below.

Research Tip:  The Stanford Daily student newspaper archive.  Search on her last name “Yaple.

_____________________

“Maiden” publication in the AER

Yaple, Maxine. The Burden of Direct Taxes as Paid by Income Classes. American Economic Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec., 1936), pp. 691-710.

_____________________

Rebecca A. Greene Fellowship at Radcliffe

Maxine Yaple Sweezy, A.B. (Stanford Univ.) 1933, A.M. (ibid.) 1934. Subject, Economics.

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1936-37, p. 17.

_____________________

Political Book:  An Economic Program for American Democracy

Contributors: Richard V. Gilbert; George H. Hildebrand Jr. ; Arthur W. Stuart; Maxine Yaple Sweezy ; Paul M. Sweezy; Lorie Tarshis and John D. Wilson. New York: Vanguard Press, 2nd printing, 1938

_____________________

Teaching appointment at Tufts

Mrs. Paul Sweezy (Maxine Yaple) has been appointed instructor in the department of economics at Tufts College for the year 1938-1939.

Source: Notes. American Economic Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (June, 1938), p. 438.

_____________________

Economics at Radcliffe, 1939
(from the yearbook)

“Don’t you think he’s a little radical?”, a girl asked her tutor about one of his colleagues in the Ec. Department. The tutor roared with laughter and gave her The Coming Struggle for Power [by John Strachey, London, 1932] to read.

Ec. Professors like to refer to their colleagues and then tear into their arguments. They should have a contest sometime to see whose masterpiece could withstand concentrated criticism. We enjoyed Mason’s reference to his “friend”. We’ve entered with glee on Chamberlin’s campaign to exterminate the word “imperfect” competition and we almost had hysterics over William’s blasting of all economists from Keynes to Hajek [sic].

The life of the Ec. Professors is constantly being interrupted by the press. The Crimson demanded a profound statement on the effect of import duties on German goods before they would let Galbraith go back to sleep in the middle of the night. Since a group collaborated on a book called An Economic Program for American Democracy, “seven men and a blonde” is the favorite characterization of the Ec. Department by the press. The blonde is Mrs. Paul Sweezy.

Source: Radcliffe College. Upon a Typical Year… Thirty and Nine. Cambridge, MA (1939).

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First article carved from dissertation research

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. Distribution of Wealth and Income under the Nazis. Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Nov., 1939), pp. 178-184.

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Radcliffe A.M. conferred in June, 1939.

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1938-39, p. 20.

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Ph.D. conferred in February, 1940

Maxine Yaple Sweezy, A.M.

Subject, Economics. Special Field, Industrial Organization and Control. Dissertation, “Nazi Economic Policies.”

 

Source: Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1939-40, p. 22.

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Second article carved from dissertation research

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. German Corporate Profits: 1926-1938. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 54, No. 3 (May, 1940), pp. 384-398.

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Published Dissertation

Maxine Yaple Sweezy. The Structure of the Nazi Economy. Harvard studies in monopoly and competition, no. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941.

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Vassar and then OPA

Maxine Y. Sweezy, assistant professor of economics at Vassar College, is on leave for the year 1942-43 to serve as senior economist for the Office of Price Administration in Washington.

Source: Notes. The American Economic Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1942), p. 964.

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Bryn Mawr and Philadelphia City Planning Commission

“The Social Economy Department also has one new member, Miss Maxine Woolston Ph.D. Radcliffe and member of the City Planning Commission, Philadelphia, has entered the department as Lecturer.”

Source: The College News, Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, PA., Wednesday, October 9, 1946, p. 2.

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Return [?] to Bryn Mawr

Maxine Y. Woolston has been appointed lecturer in political economy at Bryn Mawr College for the current year.

Source: Notes. The American Economic Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March, 1950), p. 266.

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Publications in 1950

Economic Base Study of Philadelphia, Philadelphia City Planning Commission, 1950.

World Economic Development and Peace, American Association of University Women. Washington, D.C.: 1950. [30 pages]

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Course at Haverford

Maxine Woolston to Give Course “Urban Planning”

Sociology 38, a study of the modern urban community, will be taught this semester by Dr. Maxine (William Jenks) Woolston. Mrs. Woolston comes to Haverford from Bryn Mawr College with experience both as an educator and as a public administrator.

Planning Commissioner

She is currently a consultant for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, and was a member of that commission from 1945 to 1948. During the five years previous Dr. Woolston served in turn with the OPA, the Foreign economic Administration, and the American Association of University Women.

Dr. Woolston received her A.B. and M.A. degrees in History at Stanford University in 1934. The following two years she attended the London School of Economics. In 1940 [sic] she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and earned degrees of M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Radcliffe-Harvard.

Source: Haverford News. Tuesday, February 13, 1951, p. 1.

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Textbook

Maxine Y. Woolston. Basic Information on the American Economy. Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1953. [186 pages]

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Minimum Wage Commission for Restaurant, Hotel, and Motel industries

“The state Labor and Industry Department has named a new nine-member board to recommend minimum wage rates for women and minors employed in the restaurant hotel and motel industries”. Dr. Maxine Woolston, of Bryn Mawr College and Mrs. Sadie T. M. Alexander, Philadelphia attorney were public representatives.

Source: The Daily Courier, Connellsville, PA, 16 July 1958, p. 1.

 

Image Sources: Maxine Yaple, portrait from Stanford University Quad Yearbook, 1932. Page. 160. Standing picture from the 1933 yearbook, p. 152.

 

 

Categories
Berkeley Carnegie Institute of Technology Chicago Cornell Duke Economics Programs Harvard Illinois Indiana Iowa Johns Hopkins M.I.T. Michigan Minnesota Northwestern NYU Ohio State Pennsylvania Princeton Stanford UCLA Vanderbilt Wisconsin Yale

Economics Departments and University Rankings by Chairmen. Hughes (1925) and Keniston (1957)

 

The rankings of universities and departments of economics for 1920 and 1957 that are found below were based on the pooling of contemporary expert opinions. Because the ultimate question for both the Hughes and Keniston studies was the relative aggregate university standing with respect to graduate education, “The list did not include technical schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, nor state colleges, like Iowa State, Michigan State or Penn State, since the purpose was to compare institutions which offered the doctorate in a wide variety of fields.” Hence, historians of economics will be frustrated by the conspicuous absence of M.I.T. and Carnegie Tech in the 1957 column except for the understated footnote “According to some of the chairmen there are strong departments at Carnegie Tech. and M.I.T.; also at Vanderbilt”.

The average perceived rank of a particular economics department relative to that of its university might be of use in assessing the negotiating position of department chairs with their respective university administrations. The observed movement within the perception league tables over the course of roughly a human generation might suggest other questions worth pursuing. 

Anyhow without further apology…

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About the Image: There is no face associated with rankings so I have chosen the legendary comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello for their “Who’s on First?” sketch.  YouTube TV version; Radio version: Who’s on First? starts at 22:15

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From Keniston’s Appendix (1959)

Standing of
American Graduate Departments
in the Arts and Sciences

The present study was undertaken as part of a survey of the Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to discover the present reputation of the various departments which offer programs leading to the doctorate.

A letter was addressed to the chairmen of departments in each of twenty-five leading universities of the country. The list was compiled on the basis of (1) membership in the Association of American Universities, (2) number of Ph.D.’s awarded in recent years, (3) geographical distribution. The list did not include technical schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, nor state colleges, like Iowa State, Michigan State or Penn State, since the purpose was to compare institutions which offered the doctorate in a wide variety of fields.

Each chairman was asked to rate, on an accompanying sheet, the strongest departments in his field, arranged roughly as the first five, the second five and, if possible, the third five, on the basis of the quality of their Ph.D. work and the quality of the faculty as scholars. About 80% of the chairmen returned a rating. Since many of them reported the composite judgment of their staff, the total number of ratings is well over 500.

On each rating sheet, the individual institutions were given a score. If they were rated in order of rank, they were assigned numbers from 15 (Rank 1) to 1 (Rank 15). If they were rated in groups of five, each group alphabetically arranged, those in the top five were given a score of 13, in the second five a score of 8, and in the third five a score of 3. When all the ratings sheets were returned, the scores of each institution were tabulated and compiled and the institutions arranged in order, in accordance with the total score for each department.

To determine areas of strength or weakness, the departmental scores were combined to determine [four] divisional scores. [Divisions (Departments): Biological Sciences (2), Humanities (11), Physical Sciences (6), Social Sciences (5)]….

… Finally, the scores of each institution given in the divisional rankings were combined to provide an over-all rating of the graduate standing of the major universities.

From a similar poll of opinion, made by R. M. Hughes, A Study of the Graduate Schools of America, and published in 1925, it was possible to compile the scores for each of eighteen departments as they were ranked at that time and also to secure divisional and over-all rankings. These are presented here for the purpose of showing what changes have taken place in the course of a generation.

The limitations of such a study are obvious; the ranks reported do not reveal the actual merit of the individual departments. They depend on highly subjective impressions; they reflect old and new loyalties; they are subject to lag, and the halo of past prestige. But they do report the judgment of the men whose opinion is most likely to have weight. For chairmen, by virtue of their office, are the men who must know what is going on at other institutions. They are called upon to recommend schools where students in their field may profitably study; they must seek new appointments from the staff and graduates of other schools; their own graduates tum to them for advice in choosing between alternative possibilities for appointment. The sum of their opinions is, therefore, a fairly close approximation to what informed people think about the standing of the departments in each of the fields.

 

OVER-ALL STANDING
(Total Scores)

1925

1957

1.

Chicago

1543

1.

Harvard

5403

2.

Harvard

1535

2.

California

4750

3.

Columbia 1316 3. Columbia 4183
4. Wisconsin 886 4. Yale

4094

5.

Yale 885 5. Michigan 3603
6. Princeton 805 5. Chicago

3495

7.

Johns Hopkins 746 7. Princeton 2770
8. Michigan 720 8. Wisconsin

2453

9.

California 712 9. Cornell 2239
10. Cornell 694 10. Illinois

1934

11.

Illinois 561 11. Pennsylvania 1784
12. Pennsylvania 459 12. Minnesota

1442

13.

Minnesota 430 13. Stanford 1439
14. Stanford 365 14. U.C.L.A.

1366

15.

Ohio State 294 15. Indiana 1329
16. Iowa 215 16. Johns Hopkins

1249

17.

Northwestern 143 17. Northwestern 934
18. North Carolina 57 18. Ohio State

874

19.

Indiana 45 19. N.Y.U. 801
20. Washington

759

 

ECONOMICS

1925

1957

1. Harvard 92 1. Harvard

298

2.

Columbia 75 2. Chicago 262
3. Chicago 65 3. Yale

241

4.

Wisconsin 63 4. Columbia 210
5. Yale 42 5. California

196

6.

Johns Hopkins 39 5. Stanford 196
7. Michigan 31 7. Princeton

184

8.

Pennsylvania 29 8. Johns Hopkins 178
9. Illinois 27 9. Michigan

174

10.

Cornell 25 10. Minnesota 96
11. Princeton 23 11. Northwestern

70

12.

California 22 12. Duke 69
13. Minnesota 20 13. Wisconsin

66

14.

Northwestern 18 14. Pennsylvania 45
15. Stanford 17 15. Cornell

32

16.

Ohio State 15 16. U.C.L.A.

31

According to some of the chairmen there are strong departments at Carnegie Tech. and M.I.T.; also at Vanderbilt.

 

Source:  Hayward Keniston. Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (January 1959), pp. 115-119,129.

 

 

Categories
Gender Smith Social Work Stanford

Stanford. Economics instructor for Social Problems. Lothrop, 1915-1928

 

Examining a catalogue for Stanford from the early 1920’s, I came across the name of an instructor for social problems, Margaret Mulford Lothrop. Still at that time sociology and social work were topics taught in the economics department there. From Lothrop’s biography (see below) we see she is reported to have taught at Stanford through 1928. 

While she did not complete a Ph.D. (nor do I have any evidence this was something she ever attempted), she did cover courses in the Stanford economics department and perhaps some enterprising student in Massachusetts (where perhaps personal papers might be located) will follow up on this lead. Lothrop came from a distinguished home but 

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Coursed taught by Lothrop from Stanford’s Register for 1922/23

Lothrop, Margaret Mulford, Instructor in Economics

A.B., Smith, 1905; A.M., Stanford, 1915. At Stanford since 1915.

67a. Seminar in Social Investigation.—Practical experience in some small investigation. Open only to seniors and graduates who have taken Economics 67 (Introduction to Social Investigation).

Autumn quarter (Lothrop)
autumn, 21

67b. Seminar

Winter quarter (Lothrop)
Winter, 5

103. Care of Dependents.—A study of the problems of the care of dependents and defectives in institutions and in their homes, with special reference to conditions in California. Three trips of inspection will be required.

4 units, autumn quarter (Lothrop) MTWTh 11
autumn, 39

104. Problems of Poverty.—A study of the factors causing poverty, crime, disease, and mental defectiveness, as evidences of social maladjustment; a survey of the possible means of prevention and of the social agencies attempting such work, with special reference to California. Trips of inspection will be included.

4 units, summer quarter MTWTh 11
Summer, 12

105. Crime as a Social Problem.—A study of the problems of crime: the criminal and his characteristics, the treatment of the criminal, the causes and the prevention of crime, with special reference to conditions in California. Three trips of inspection of institutions will be required.

5 units, winter quarter (Lothrop) MTWThF 11
winter, 42

117. Problems of Child Welfare.—A brief survey of problems of child protection and care from the social viewpoint, with special reference to conditions in California.

2 units, summer quarter (Lothrop) TTh 10
summer, 14

118. Seminar in Social Problems.—Practical experience in some investigation.

Winter quarter (Lothrop) By arrangement
Winter, 12

Source: Leland Stanford Junior University, Register for 1922/23, pp. 34, 162-164
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Biography of Margaret Lothrop from National Park Service

Margaret Lothrop was born to Daniel and Harriett Lothrop on July 27, 1884 at The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts. She was the only child of parents who were focused on literature and were interested in the preservation of history. Her mother wrote many books under the pen name of Margaret Sydney, including the children’s series the Five Little Peppers, and her father was a publisher, owning the D. Lothrop Publishing Co.

They had purchased The Wayside because of its history, being the house lived in by authors Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and being a witness house to the British troops marching in and out of Concord on the fateful day of April 19, 1775. With this patriotic and literary upbringing, Margaret became the first member of the National Society of Children of the American Revolution, newly founded by her mother in 1895.

Margaret saw many social events at her home, hosted by her mother, including the Hawthorne Centenary in 1904 where a monument was placed in the yard at The Wayside in honor of Hawthorne, and including fundraisers for such organizations as the Massachusetts Volunteer Aid Society. Margaret knew some of the great literary figures of the time, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Julia Ward Howe, and Samuel Francis Smith. She also saw her mother open their house for sight-seers.

Education

Margaret attended Concord schools, graduating from Concord High School known as a scholar and horsewoman. She attended Smith College, where she was a member of the Philosophical Society, the Italian Club, and a half back on the women’s field hockey team, graduating in 1905. She moved to California in 1912 where she earned her M.A. in Economics at Stanford University.

Career Woman

She moved back to Massachusetts where she worked at the Women’s Education and Industrial Union and the YWCA in Boston from 1913-15. She then returned to Stanford University where she was an instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences through 1928.

During WWI she was in the Red Cross where she was assigned as a Casualty Searcher in France, which included documenting graves, searching for families of men with memory loss, and speaking with dying men to identify their families.

Returning to The Wayside

Following the death of her mother in 1924, Margaret formed a committee in Concord to plan to open The Wayside for tourists in 1928. After serving as the Secretary of the California Society of the Prevention of Cruelty of Children for two years, she returned to The Wayside in 1932. Margaret researched the occupants of the house, coordinated staff and maintained the house for tours, tried to find organizations that would purchase the house for education purposes (to no avail), and wrote the book The Wayside: Home of Authors (published in 1940).

Preservation of The Wayside

During WWII, Margaret served as a member of the Red Cross and the Massachusetts Women’s Defense Corps. Through the 1940s to early 1960s, Margaret continued to maintain the house for tours, responded to letters from other researchers, wrote articles including “My House and the Minute Men,” and conducted her own research, including direct communication with the Hawthorne family.

She worked to have The Wayside declared a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and she sold the house to the National Park Service to become part of Minute Man National Historical Park on June 18, 1965. Margaret worked closely with the NPS staff, including contributing the bulk of her research to the park, giving oral histories, and speaking to groups.

Margaret Mulford Lothrop died in Concord on May 14, 1970. She left an extensive legacy, especially The Wayside, where she had been born and had spent so much time preserving for future generations. The house was re-opened by the NPS on April 17, 1971.

Source: National Park Service. Margaret Lothrop webpage. Also source of the image of Margaret Lothrop in her Red-Cross uniform.

Categories
Columbia Economists Harvard NBER Stanford

Columbia. Economics Ph.D. alumnus. Moses Abramovitz, 1939

 

 

The professional career of Moses Abramovitz shows what a blend of Harvard and Columbia training in economics crowned by an NBER post-doc could get you back in the day. His contributions to the study of long-term growth and to the Stanford economics department’s rise to prominence are truly important legacies.

The first item of the post gives us Abramovitz’s personal quarter-century report to his Harvard classmates of 1932. This is followed by excerpts from Abramovitz’s memoir for his family that provide a rich account of his economics training at Harvard and then Columbia. A link to download the entire memoir is provided below. The post closes with a memorial resolution written by Abramovitz’s Stanford colleagues. But the real treat, is found in Moses Abramovitz’s description of his economics education and economists important for his development. Among other things we learn, the chairman of the Harvard economics department, Harold Burbank, was indeed anti-Semitic enough for Abramovitz not to have dignified him by name. Also we learn that in 1934 “Milton [Friedman] was much less ideological then than he later became, so he was a very pleasant and agreeable companion.”

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From the 25th reunion report of the Harvard Class of 1932

MOSES ABRAMOVITZ

Home address: 543 W. Crescent Drive, Palo Alto, Calif.
Office address: Dept. of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
Born: Jan. 1, 1912, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Parents: Nathan Abramovitz, Betty Goldenberg.
Prepared at: Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Years in College: 1928-1932.
Degrees: A.B. summa cum laude, 1932; Ph.D. (Columbia Univ.), 1939.
Married: Carrie Glasser, June 13, 1937, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Child: Joel Nathan, July 19, 1950.
Occupation: Professor of economics, Stanford University; member research staff, national Bureau of Economic Research.
Offices Held: Member editorial board, American Economic Review, 1951-54.
Member of: American Economic Association; American Statistical Association; American Economic History Association; Royal Economic Society; American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Publications: Price Theory for a Changing Economy; Inventories and Business Cycles; The Economics of Growth; “Capital Formation and Economic Growth,” editor; The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain (with Vera Eliasberg).

I LEFT Harvard supported by a Sheldon Fellowship and exhilarated by the prospect of a year in Europe—no small piece of luck at any time and a pot of good fortune in 1932. Together with Dave Popper, I saw Paris and the Rhine country as they were before the second deluge. We saw our first Storm Trooper rallies in Heidelberg and, if we were not too innocent, we were certainly too full of good spirits to be greatly disturbed. But those charming days were suddenly cut short. From Nuremberg, I was called home by my father’s death.

Back in New York I began graduate work in economics at Columbia and continued there until 1935. In 1936, I was lucky enough to be brought back to Harvard as an instructor for two years and had the fun and satisfaction of being again in Cambridge as a teacher while my memories of life at college were still warm. At Columbia I had met another young economist whom I had known years before. I shall stick to the essentials. The young economist was a woman. We were married in 1937, so Carrie has had a year at Harvard, too.

In 1938, we were back in New York again, this time to work at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In the years that followed I learned what I know about scientific investigation from Wesley Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns. Together they were in the midst of their wide-ranging investigation of business cycles. They set me to work studying inventory fluctuations. In the fullness of time I got some results and published a book, a hefty volume called Inventories and Business Cycles. It got some notice and caused some controversy, and a certain number of copies continue to serve as ballast for bookcases that might otherwise be disturbed by a fresh breeze.

Early in 1942, I went to Washington to help Bob Nathan and the W.P.B. Planning Committee, first to goad the military into laying out programs big enough to make use of a national productive capacity they could not believe existed, and then to keep them from losing the munitions they really needed under the load of programs too large for even our capacity. A year later I was at O.S.S. working for Professor Langer and Dean Mason on German economic intelligence. My particular job was probably of little use during the war itself, but it produced a collection of materials and a few more or less knowledgeable individuals, and both were needed after the German defeat. I became involved in the negotiations about German reparations and in that way came to see Moscow in the months right after V-E Day. Our work, as we all now know, foundered in the general wreck of American-Soviet relations. Together with many other stalemated delegations on many other subjects, ours eventually came to Potsdam to be witnesses at the beginning of the partition of Germany and Europe.

Since 1948 I have been a professor at Stanford. We have one child, a boy now six. We think living here near San Francisco as comfortable and delightful as it can be; so I rush back east as often as I can to disgorge the lotus and discharge my guilt.

My chief activity is still, as it has been for many years, research in economics—a stubborn, unyielding, frustrating and altogether exasperating subject from which I don’t know how to shake loose. What do I believe? One’s bent of mind is shaped by one’s work. Mine is inclined to skepticism, not beliefs, still less belief. Very likely I have much to learn. Oh yes! I believe both parties are right – in what each says about the other.

Source:  Harvard Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (1957), pp.6-8.

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Undergraduate and graduate student days: memories of Harvard and Columbia

…My fourth course [freshman year at Harvard] was different. It was elementary economics. I was lucky. I drew an excellent instructor named Bigelow. Using Frank W. Taussig’s Principles, he introduced us to the general logic of the neoclassical theories of relative prices of commodities and of the factors of production, land, labor, and capital, to the distribution of income among these primary factors, to the theory of international trade, and to the virtues of free markets. He offered us a list of supplementary readings, one of which was called simply Supply and Demand, by an English economist, H.D. Henderson. It was a thin book, but it was a notable example of the lucid presentation of the logic of the economics of value and distribution. One could see all around one examples in ordinary life of the validity and importance of the theory. The way in which the various parts of the subject hung together in an interdependent system seemed not only analytically deep; it emerged as a beautiful structure, an aesthetic as well as a logical and tested structure. More than any other experience, it was this little book that drew me to go on with economics. When I returned to Harvard in September 1929, therefore, I chose economics as my field of concentration. And, indeed, when the economy began its collapse in October of that year, it confirmed me in my choice. It was a decisive experience.

Concentrating in Economics

Having chosen to concentrate in economics, I was assigned a tutor. Here again I was lucky. He was Edward S. Mason, then a still young assistant professor. But he was destined for both academic leadership and, as my story unfolds, for a real influence on practical affairs. Even more important for me, however, was the fact that this young man was already recognizably “wise,” a man of good judgment in both scholarly decisions and practical matters. He took a liking to me, and he remembered his friends! He was due to turn up with support and help at several critical junctures in my story.

My very first meeting with Mason was an exciting moment. It was late September or early October in 1929, that fateful year. We chatted, and then, more brash than usual, I said, “Well, Professor, when is the stock market going to break?” He answered, without hesitation, “Almost immediately.” And when I returned for our second meeting, it had happened. And then, still brash, I said, “Well, Professor, you must have made a mint of money.” And then I learned something about him and perhaps most academics of the time. He said, “Are you crazy? I have never owned a share of stocks in my life.”

… Like many, but not all, of the young economists of the time, who had no deep commitment to mainstream economics, I saw clearly enough that mainstream theory offered us no guidance in understanding the Great Contraction and Depression, and it was consequently a poor basis for public policy. Something new was needed, a theory that dealt more adequately with recurrent recessions and expansions of business and particularly with the very serious depressions and eventual recoveries which in the U.S. had succeeded one another at intervals of about 15 to 20 years since the 1830s. For the moment, I did not get beyond dissatisfaction with the older wisdom, Real enlightenment came only in 1936 with the publication of J.M. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. When I had absorbed Keynes’s reasoning, I became an enthusiasticKeynesian and I remain so to this day.

There was also a quite personal effect of these developments on my own work history. They prepared me to join the National Bureau of Economic Research when the chance came in 1937 and to do empirical research on business cycles under the direction of Wesley Mitchell and Arthur Burns, the most notable people doing such work at that time.

Still an undergraduate in 1929, however, at the beginning of the economic contraction and depression, I still had three years of undergraduate work to do. Guided by Mason and later by Douglas V. Brown, I took Taussig’s famous course in price theory at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Taussig was then the leading American price theorist of his time and by far the most influential person in the Economics Department. In these courses, conducted by Socratic methods, he clearly formed a good opinion about me. I am sure he was of help to me behind the scenes at several junctures. I also remember two enlightening courses, Sumner Slichter on Labor Economics and John Williams on Money and Banking. In Williams’s course, I read Keynes’s earlier books and began to become familiar with his way of thinking. Anyhow, I did well in all these courses and in others in economics, history, and in one really interesting course in literature. That was Irving Babbett on Rousseau and Romanticism. I was apparently a natural-born good student and exam taker. The upshot was that I was graduated summa cum laude and I was given a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship.

For me, this last was more than an honor and more than a year of support and European travel and study at a time when money was so scarce and jobs for new college graduates almost nonexistent. My tutors and professors, including the influential Taussig, had already been encouraging me to think about going on to graduate study in economics and to an eventual academic career. To my parents and my brother, such a course was strange and uncertain. Abe began to call me “meshugana Moishele.” But it was clear that in the end they would support me in any decision I made. And the fellowship, which was tangible proof of the good opinion of the Harvard faculty, confirmed me in a career choice I had already more than half made: It was a decisive event.

[late June of 1932 left for Europe but Moses Abramovitz’s father died in September 1932]

… I resigned my scholarship and in that September of 1932 walked along Nostrand Avenue to Eastern Parkway and took the subway (IRT, Broadway and 7th Avenue Line) to Broadway and 116th Street. Half a block away, one entered Columbia. I walked in and registered and began three years of graduate work in economics. This was a big departure from the program I had thought lay before me, but I cannot remember any feeling of distress or resistance. I was glad to provide some degree of solid continuity for my mother, and I felt confident about the future. Columbia would also be a good start.

 

Columbia as a School of Economics

By forgoing Vienna, Cambridge, and Harvard, I had made a bigger change than I realized when I started in Columbia. Vienna, Cambridge, and Harvard were all centers in which understanding of the domestic economy of a country and of its international economic relations was squarely based on theoretical economics. This, in turn, was a doctrine logically derived from certain basic primary assumptions: that economic agents (consumers, savers, business firms, investors generally) were well informed, foresighted, and rational, and acted to promote their own individual interests, that they faced competitive markets and, as business firms, acted under the pressures of competition; they operated subject to the constraints of income and wealth and of market prices which they could not by their own actions significantly influence. Actions in this context were perceived as leading to an equilibrium of prices, wages, profits, etc., and of consumer satisfactions in which change might be harmful to some but would be more than offset by benefit to others. Thus, there was no room or occasion for public action except such as was necessary to enforce contracts, maintain competition, prevent or punish fraud and generally keep the peace. Changes in technology and in consumer tastes would lead to a new equilibrium of prices, rewards, incomes, etc., but such changes were viewed as “exogenous,” not the result of economic action or motivation and beyond the ken of economics.

The Columbia economists, however, rejected this structure of theory or, at least, its general application. They conceded its usefulness in explaining very simple matters: why a grand piano cost more than a pair of shoes, and, in general, why there is a rough association between the prices of commodities and their costs of production. They were skeptical, however, about the theoretical assumptions that agents were foresighted, well-informed, and rational. They saw markets as characterized by various degrees of monopoly power, with business firms capable not only of profiting by constraining production and raising prices more than costs alone would justify; they also often had the power to shape consumer tastes, for example by advertising, and, most important, to invest in research and development and so to advance and sometimes to retard—technological progress. They tended to see the economy as a whole, not as tending to an equilibrium, but as generating long-term growth of productivity, income, and wealth. This tendency did not, however, emerge continuously and at a stable rate but subject to recurrent fluctuations, loosely called “cyclical,” in which advance was sometimes fast,sometimes slow, and sometimes negative.

As I absorbed all this, I saw the justice of the Columbia outlook and came to appreciate its radical departure from the economics in which I had been trained as a Harvard undergraduate. Columbia economics, as it stood in the Thirties, however, had its own serious limitations. It was well advanced in its understanding of two subjects. One was in the study of the behavior of firms that had acquired and enjoyed various kinds and degrees of monopoly power. This was the province of Arthur Robert (“Columbia”) Burns—not the Arthur Frank (“Bureau”) Burns with whom I later did research on business cycles.

The other subject was another sphere of monopoly power, that of labor unions. Why were they so much less important in the U.S.A. than in Europe? What activities were successfully unionized and which not? And why? This was the area over which Leo Wolman ruled. Wolman later played a considerable role in the Roosevelt Administration, especially in connection with the disorders in the labor market stemming from the organizing drives of the AFL/CIO. He worked as chairman of the Automobile Labor Board, where he tried to keep the peace in that important industry—an effort that won him no friends in the unions. Wolman’s teaching, however, was as far from academic as can be imagined. It came directly from his own experience with labor unions. Although a professor at Columbia, he also worked as the economic advisor of Sidney Hillman, the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the men’s clothing union. Wolman learned as much as he advised. He saw clearly that in the flexible and mobile population conditions of the American continent, the only unions that could exercise strong and stable monopoly power were those operating in industries frozen in location. The newsprint industry was an example. The book print industry was not. Where the industry could move, it could flee from a union whose wage and other demands were excessive. Such a condition faced the Amalgamated, and Wolman used his influence to restrain labor’s demands. Even so, the industry moved from New York City to upstate New York, then down South, then to Chicago and on to California. It was the barrier to movement posed by small nation-states that made European unions stronger and more stable than America’s.

These subjects then were well taught at Columbia, and I felt I learned much from A.R. Burns and Leo Wolman. The basic academic tone of the faculty, however, stemmed from Wesley Mitchell. He had been the dominating influence on the faculty since he joined it just before the First World War. According to Mitchell’s own view of himself, his outlook stemmed in part from his early Midwestern origins. He was the son of a physician who was a small town practitioner in central Illinois. The down-to-earth pragmatism of the neighboring family farmers ran strongly in his personality. It was quite natural, therefore, that he should have been drawn to the philosophical schools of William James and John Dewey when these became prominent. Experience, not the logical implications of some generalized ideal, had to be our guide to life. He told about teasing his good Baptist grandmother and her conception of a God of Love who could yet condemn unbaptized infants to the torments of Hell.

[…]

Mitchell carried out his scheme and reported his findings, together with his evidence, in a large book with the simple title, Business Cycles. The book began with a summary of earlier work relevant to the subject together with the “speculations” (one of Mitchell’s favorite characterizations of largely theoretical but inadequately verified ideas). He used these as suggestions of subjects needing investigation. There followed Mitchell’s own quantitative studies of these and other subjects: production (agricultural and other), income, sales, retail, wholesale, manufacturing, etc., commodity prices, the prices of stocks and bonds, and the profits and interest rates they paid. Mitchell’s quantitative descriptions involved tracing the fluctuations of the behavior in these activities and of their long-term trend and seasonal fluctuations so that the fluctuations connected with business cycles could be seen free of the influence of trends and seasonal factors. The book ended with a statement of Mitchell’s views of how the concatenation of the behavior of the separate activities led to expansions of business activities in general followed by similarly general contractions, which in turn produced the conditions that generated another business expansion.

Mitchell’s book made a notable impression on economists. This was partly because now, for the first time, students of economics could base their attempts to explain business cycles and to develop a theoretical model based on definite quantitative information about the typical behavior of the major business activities. But it was partly, perhaps mainly, because it gave economists at large a new vision of how economic research could be carried on. It need not mainly consist of logical deductions from a set of preannounced assumptions. It could instead take the form of observed behavior, together with empirical tests of the hypotheses so formed based on fresh observations independent of those from which the hypotheses originally proposed had been drawn. It was this vision of an empirically based economics that was the spirit of the Columbia program, and it stood in sharp contrast to the program at Harvard, where I was introduced to the subject, and, indeed, with the economics then taught in the other leading universities.

I did not give up my allegiance to Harvard easily. Two episodes illustrate my resistance. Mitchell gave a course on business cycles. I chose to take it. It was a course that, in a sense, was a duplicate of his 1913 book, refreshed by data not available in 1913. But as I listened to Mitchell’s “analysis” of one time series after another—amplitude, lead or lag relative to the “reference” peak or trough (that is, relative to the peak or trough of the general business cycle), rates of expansion or contraction in successive thirds of the fluctuations, and more—I could make nothing of it. After some weeks I dropped the course. Mitchell signed the necessary form without demur and, apparently, never held it against me—a characteristic of his liberal and tolerant attitude.

In other respects, my year was pleasant and rewarding. I found Eli Ginzberg and began a lifelong friendship, the closest and most intimate in my life. Like other graduate students, I occupied a “cubicle” on the top floor of the new Butler Library—just enough space for a table, chair, and file cabinet. A friend said: “It’s all right if I am in there alone, but if I get an idea, I have to move into the corridor.” One day, there was a knock on my door, and in walked Eli. He had just returned from a scholarship, traveling the country and interviewing business executives, union bosses, politicians, etc. On his return, he asked Mrs. Stewart, the all-knowing department secretary, what new people were interesting. She mentioned me, and there he was. He sat down and began to tell me about his travels, the first of many sessions on the same subject.

One early reward of my new friendship was to come to know his parents. They occupied an eighth-floor apartment on 114th Street, directly behind the Butler Library. Eli’s father, Louis Ginzberg, was a professor in the Jewish Theological Seminary at 120th Street. He was perhaps the most notable Jewish scholar of his time, a specialist in Talmudic history and interpretation based on a wide knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern languages and in the history of its peoples. Eli began to bring me to their Friday evening suppers. I found old Louis to be a wise and humorous man, a fine companion and host for a pleasant evening.

On one of my first visits, Eli took me into Louis’s study to show me a lampshade that one of Louis’s students had made. The parchment shade was decorated. All around the shade were drawn the spines of books, and on each spine there appeared the title of one of Louis’s books, perhaps 14 or 15 in all. And then the student had an inspiration. He added one more spine and on it drew the title of Eli’s first book, his Ph.D. dissertation, The House of Adam Smith. At the time, we wondered whether Eli could duplicate his Father’s achievement. In fact, he did so many times over, in quantity at least, if not always in depth—something to which Eli did not aspire.

[…]

Now back to my struggle between Harvard and Columbia economics. In that second year at Columbia, the internal conflict found two new exponents. On the Columbia side was Eli. He was someone of great personal interest to me, but as an economist, he was an eccentric. He was a skeptic about anything theoretical and served mainly as an exemplar of Columbia’s tolerance for talent in whatever way it showed itself. On the Harvard side, there now appeared a powerful supporter. He was Milton Friedman, who had come to Columbia on a scholarship for a year of graduate work. We soon became good friends. It emerged that we two were the only Columbia students who had had a real training in neoclassical price theory, the very bedrock of the economics of the time. The faculty, moreover, refused to sanction a course in the subject, and the students realized what they were missing. Milton and I undertook to do something to fill the gap. We organized a student-run seminar, worked out a list of topics, assigned students to prepare papers, and guided the presentation and discussion. The other students benefitted and so did we. We were having our first teaching experience. For the moment, however, it helped keep my mind running in the grooves of my Harvard training

My friendship with Milton was solidified when a Columbia classmate invited us to join him in a long holiday in his family’s fishing camp on the French River in Northern Ontario, still a wild and unsettled area. It turned out, however, that our friend was ordered to work in his family’s business concern for the summer. We were invited to use the camp ourselves, and we did. So we spent a wonderful six weeks together. We drove north in my Model A Ford roadster until we reached a tiny settlement on the French River called Bon Air. There we parked the car at a general store where we hired some cots, some cooking utensils, a gasoline cookstove, and a canoe, and where we bought some canned and packaged foods as well as eggs and Canadian back bacon. The general store owner piled all these objects in his motorboat and, with the canoe in tow, took us out to our camp 3½ miles down the river on a tiny island in the stream. We were the only inhabitants. There he literally threw our stuff on the shore and took his leave. From now on, we had to depend on our canoe to get back and renew supplies at Bon Air.

Neither of us at first knew anything about canoeing, but we had good teachers by example in the Indians from a reservation across the river. Watching them, we soon learned the J stroke and became fairly competent. We canoed to Bon Air twice weekly and soon organized our camp. We had a privy some 50 yards away. We had the usual first experience trying to cook rice, but we learned to get along. We swam twice a day, and, as we gained confidence in the canoe, took overnight canoe trips down the river. These were fun, especially because of occasional rapids which we could run going down the river but had to portage around on the way back. The one thing we did not try was fishing. In fact, we became known along the river as those strange boys who did not fish, so many men returning in the late afternoon would throw us a fish or two. We had a valuable supplement to our diet of canned goods.

The thing we did do all day long, every day, was talk—about everything, but mostly economics. Milton was much less ideological then than he later became, so he was a very pleasant and agreeable companion; that was especially important in 1934, in the depths of the Depression when Roosevelt’s New Deal was just taking shape, when it included so much that was controversial, and when the menace of Hitler was becoming clearly visible.

As things turned out, however, the most important thing for me in that academic year of 1933-34 was the advent of Carrie [whom he would marry]. But that belongs in a chapter of its own.

…When I finished my graduate course work in 1935, I was given an instructorship at Harvard, I owed it to the sponsorship of Ed Mason, my old tutor. With all this arranged, we determined to get married. I was to have a first year to get started at Harvard, and Carrie was to have a year to complete her Columbia course. We would marry in June 1937. We told our parents and friends. Everyone was pleased.

…You will recall that on completing my graduate work at Columbia, I returned to Harvard as an instructor and tutor in 1936. I spent the first year on my own; then, following our marriage, Carrie joined me there. We lived in a comfortable little apartment at 31 Concord Avenue, near the RadcliffeYard.

It turned out to be an unsatisfactory time, which brought each of us into our only serious confrontations with discrimination. For Carrie it was a brush with what would now be called “sexism.” She heard that Wellesley was looking for a young instructor. She thought correctly that her graduate work and teaching experience qualified her. She appeared for an interview, which was conducted by John Dunlop, a Harvard professor. They reviewed her background, and, he conceded, she was qualified. And then he told her, with expressions of regret, that her application could go no further. Wellesley, a women’s college, wanted only a male.

My own problem was an example of that anti-Semitism that still infected Harvard and most other universities. During my time back at Harvard, I had taught Ec A and a course in Labor Market Economics, and I had tutored a full quota of economics majors in my tutorial rooms in Dunster House. I thought it had gone pretty well.

To this I should add the tale of an amusing development. When I returned to Cambridge in September 1937 together with Carrie, I was told by the department chairman that my salary, then $2,500 a year, would be raised by $200. And then he carefully explained that that was not because, as a married man, my expenses were higher. It was because I was married that he could add Radcliffe girls to my list of tutees. Needless to say, the relation of women to men has since changed radically. Harvard and Radcliffe are now fully merged. Women and men are now equally Harvard professors and Harvard students. The days when Radcliffe girls were thought to be at special and intolerable risk if they met an unmarried tutor have long gone.

In the spring of 1938, I received another summons from the chairman [Harold Burbank]. He received me cordially, and after the usual preliminary politenesses, he explained that it was time we discussed my future at Harvard. His opening was itself a warning about what was to come. “Now, Moe, we are both men of the world.” And then he went on to say that I had done well. I had a promising future. “But you must understand; we could not promote Jakey, so you must not expect to stay on here.” I had formed no such expectation, but I understood perfectly. “Jakey” was Jacob Viner, a truly notable economist. He had done brilliant theoretical work early. He was Taussig’s favorite student. Clearly, Harvard’s president at the time was a bar. He would not accept the appointment of Jews, something widely whispered. They might be scholars, but, by Lowell’s Boston Brahmin standards, they could not be gentlemen. So all this was hardly a complete surprise. But my chairman’s quiet but open expression of anti-Semitism was a shock.

I have often wondered whether it was not really a subtle way of ending my appointment without saying that I simply had not measured up. Perhaps, but that could hardly apply to Viner, who went on to do brilliant work, and who ended his career as a colleague of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Had a Nobel Prize for Economics existed at the time, he would certainly have been a Nobel laureate.

So I left the interview knowing that I had to make plans to move. My opportunity was not long in coming. Later that same spring, I appeared again at Columbia for the defense of my dissertation, the last step on the way to the doctorate. The committee was chaired by Wesley Mitchell, the man whose course on business cycles I had dropped six year earlier. It made no difference to the examination. Apparently, I passed easily. Indeed my thesis won the Seligman Prize for the best of the year. When the committee adjourned, Mitchell asked me to stay behind. He wanted to ask me whether I would be willing to join the National Bureau to work with him on the Bureau’s business cycles project. My salary would be $3,500 year, a thousand dollars above my Harvard salary. In my circumstances it did not take me long to decide. In a couple of days he had my answer. I would be delighted. So now, after our first summer in Maine, Carrie and I moved to New York. I can guess now how the Bureau appointment had come about. My friend Milton Friedman (see Chapter Six), had just joined the Bureau with an appointment like my own, but to work on another subject. Milton was a friend and also the favorite student of Arthur F. Burns, at the time Mitchell’s chief assistant, who was already the really effective head of the business cycles work. My guess is that Milton became aware of Burns’s interest in finding an associate for business cycles to work especially on the cyclical role of inventories. My dissertation included a chapter on inventories. So he probably told Burns, and then events took their course.

 

Source:  Moses Abramovitz, Days Gone By: A Memoir for my Family (2001), pp. 32-34, 41-49, 77-79. (Link to download the memoir as .pdf)

_______________________

Stanford Faculty Memorial Resolution

MOSES ABRAMOVITZ
(1912-2000)

Moses Abramovitz, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus, died December 1, 2000, at Stanford University Hospital, just one month before reaching his eighty-ninth birthday.

Known by his family, friends, and colleagues as “Moe,” Abramovitz was one of the primary builders of Stanford’s Department of Economics. He taught at Stanford for almost thirty years, taking leave only during 1962-63 to work as economic advisor to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. He served as chair from 1963 to 1965, and from 1971 to 1974, both critical junctures in the department’s history. During his tenure at Stanford and after his retirement in 1976, Moe gained international renown and admiration for his pioneering contributions to the study of long-term economic growth.

Moe was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Romanian Jewish immigrant family. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he entered Harvard in 1928. Like many of his generation, Moe’s interest in economics was stimulated by the experience of the Great Depression. So, in 1932 he continued his undergraduate studies of the subject at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1939. At Columbia, Moe began a lifelong friendship with Milton Friedman. In later years, Moe liked to joke that he had been debating with Friedman for more than fifty years, and consistently winning — except when Milton was present. Columbia connections also led Moe to join the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1937, where he helped to launch the business cycle studies for which the Bureau became famous, working with such figures as Wesley Mitchell, Simon Kuznets and Arthur Burns.

Also at Columbia, Moe became re-acquainted with his Erasmus classmate Carrie Glasser, who was also working for her doctoral degree in economics. Moe and Carrie were married in June of 1937, and were devoted to each other until Carrie’s death in October 1999. When Moe came to Stanford in 1948, Carrie began what became a highly satisfying and successful career as a painter, sculptress and collage artist. Their only son, Joel, born in 1946, is a practicing neurosurgeon in Connecticut.

During World War II, Moe served first at the War Production Board, working with Simon Kuznets to analyze the limits of feasible production during wartime. He then moved to the Office of Strategic Services as chief of the European industry and trade section. During 1945 and 1946, he was economic advisor to the United States representative on the Allied Reparations Commission. Moe’s modest but strong character was well displayed in an episode during the postwar reparations debate. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had proposed a plan to deindustrialize the German economy. An OSS research team headed by Moe wrote a memorandum arguing that this plan would destroy Germany’s capacity to export, leaving it unable to pay for food and other essential imports. At a meeting with Moe and two other OSS economists, Ed Mason and Emile Despres, Morgenthau angrily asked: “Who is responsible for this?” Moe recalled: “Mason looked at Despres, and Emile looked at me. I had no one else to look at. The buck stopped with me. So, rather meekly, I said I was responsible.”

This anecdote and many others may be found in a charming memoir that Moe completed shortly before his death, “Days Gone By,” accessible on the Stanford Economics Department website.

At Stanford Moe began the studies of long-term economic growth that established his reputation among professional economists. A 1956 paper provided the first systematic estimates showing that forces raising the productivity of labor and capital were responsible for approximately half of the historical growth rate of real U.S. GDP, and close to three quarters of the growth rate of real GDP per capita. Subsequently he made seminal contributions in identifying the factors promoting and obstructing convergence in levels of productivity among advanced and developing countries of the world. For these studies and others, Moe received many academic honors. He was elected to the presidency of the American Economic Association (1979-80), the Western Economic Association (1988-89), and the Economic History Association (1992-93). From abroad came honorary doctorates from the University of Uppsala in Sweden (1985), and the University of Ancona in Italy (1992); he took special enjoyment from an invitation to become a fellow of the prestigious Academia Nazionale de Lincei in 1991 — “following Galileo with a lag,” he said, with a characteristic self-deprecatory twinkle.

Committee:

Paul A. David
Ronald McKinnon
Gavin Wright

Source: Stanford Report, July 9, 2003.

Image Source: Harvard Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (1957).