A memorandum written in 1973 by 64-year old Albert G. Hart shares his laments concerning the path taken by the Columbia University department of economics to what he saw to be a grievous neglect of instruction and research into the institutional nuts-and-bolts, historical trajectories, and granular area studies of economics. A copy of the memorandum was found in the files of his colleague, historian of economics, Joseph Dorfman.
Chicago-style economics was explicitly disdained by Hart who actually wished good riddance to Gary Becker (“…he played dog-in-the-manger too much…” with a note of scorn for Milton Friedman (“… [he] ignores the risk that what passes for ‘general economic law’ may turn out to be a series of adhockeries concocted to be plausible for a very special and perhaps transitory state of society…”).
The memo closes with a question of what to do with the theoretical Wunderkinder of economics departments whose peak years have past with still another quarter century of tenure left in their respective academic life-cycles. Fortunately he stops considerably short of recommending senicide.
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Previously posted content related to Albert G. Hart
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Exams for Introduction to Money and Banking at Chicago, A. G. Hart, 1932-35
Course Outline for Introduction to Money and Banking at Chicago. A. G. Hart, 1933
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Hiring Albert Gailord Hart as visiting professor, 1946
Core Economic Theory. Hart, 1946-47
First semester graduate economic analysis. First weeks’ notes. Hart, 1955
Reading list for Economic Analysis (less advanced level). Hart and Wonnacott, 1959
Hart Memo, Economics Faculty Salaries for 15 U.S. universities. April 1961
Personal Narrative of the Columbia Crisis. A.G. Hart, May 1968
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AGH 11 July 1973
RESPONSIBILITIES AND RESOURCES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Response, addressed to:
Professor Donald Dewey, Chairman,
Professor Ronald Findlay, Director of Graduate Studies
Continuing and Incoming members of the Department
Dean George S. FRANKEL, Graduate School
Dean Harvey PICKER, School of International Affairs
Interested bystanders
to report of Committee of Instruction on the Department of Economics,
by Albert G. Hart, Professor of Economies.
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Preliminary generalities
The COI [Committee of Instruction] report is one of those papers which an informed reader finds simultaneously to be almost-excellent and almost-horrible. I can endorse with only minor reservations its conclusions that recent senior-staff recruiting has been of excellent calibre; that the intensification of workshop-patterns is very healthy; that much stress should be placed on catching good men before their qualifications known to us have become so generally know as to create a bull market; that the graduate students are only moderately happy, and that to build on the quantitative theoretical work of Lancaster, Phelps, and now Dhrymes is a promising way to rebuild morale as well as to establish Columbia again as a major professional focus.
Yet the report is so lop-sided that its net effect is likely not to be constructive. It overlooks entirely two major sides of economics in which Columbia has been, is, and ought to be prominent, and which are of major concern to students. And its lack of historical perspective and of a realistic view of the professional life-cycle may seriously distort its proposals and the reaction to the Department of the central leadership of the University. So I do not see how I can silently let this report stand as expressing real wisdom about the Department and its futures hence this “reaction”.
Some historical correctives
To clear the ground, let me disabuse the reader of the notion that the Department is only now beginning to work on the problems central to the COI report. In the first place, the fact that the workshop pattern of faculty-student interaction (taking in professional visitors) is central to the learning process in economics has been well understood for a long time. At the moment when I became chairman (in 1958), the Department was granted $250,000 by the Ford Foundation specifically to make a major shift toward workshop groupings. The deservedly-praised labor workshop (which non-accidentally had a Becker/Mincer leadership with experience in workshop endeavors at the University of Chicago) was one; we launched also an “Industrial Countries Workshop” (led by Carter Goodrich and Goran Ohlin) which developed a very useful line of publications, a Public Finance Workshop led by Carl Shoup and W. S. Vickrey, and an Expectational Economics workshop under my leadership which was clearly the least successful of the cluster, for reasons I won’t bother the reader with, but for all that far from useless). Presently we had a very lively and constructive International Economics workshop (led by Peter Kenen), which continued under Ronald Findlay; and for a number of years we have had a good-if-not-superlative Monetary Economics workshop (managed by Philip Cagan with partnership of Hart and Barger). In 1972/73 we tried a “Development/Regional” shop, which has been floundering somewhat — partly because it is hard to find a real focus with so many students not in the habit of working together, partly because of its natural leaders, Findlay had to put his main energy into the international field and Wellisz was absent on leave.
What is new in the workshop situation is in the first place the effort (led by Findlay, with enthusiastic support of most of the rest of the Department) to make it work for virtually everybody in the Department, faculty or student — and in the second place serious recognition by the Administration that this is an appropriate-if-expensive way to work, deserving serious backing even if no more Ford funds can be had.
A second consequential historical point (hinted at but not spelled out in the COI report) is that the Department has been working for years at the kind of staffing the COI report now indicates as appropriate. When I was chairman, for example, we had a deal arranged to recruit Svi [sic] Griliches — which was frustrated by what I am bound to call sabotage at the ad hoc committee stage. In Carl Shoup’s chairmanship, we successfully recruited at the assistant professor level two key men who beautifully exemplify the application of quantitative theory and econometric research techniques to economics — Peter Kenen and Gary Becker, both of whom were full professors very young, and were regarded as stars in the profession. In my chairmanship and afterwards, much of the work of the chairman went into nursing these two men’s careers and working conditions. Kenen contributed among other things a distinguished job as departmental leader — first Informally leading a curricular reform, then taking over as chairman for a term-and-a-fraction; had the 1968 not disrupted his strategy, he’d have brought us out as one of the two or three leading departments of economics. Becker, with all his virtues, was unlivable and not available as Departmental leader — being too much centered in his own work, too much inclined to insist that the only desirable recruits were quasi-Beckers, too narrow in his views of the profession’s responsibilities (despite his astounding record of success in applying his own apparently-narrow approach to an unexpectedly wide range of problems). Frankly, I felt it unburdened the Department when he moved to Chicago, because much as we must regret the loss of his lively influence on campus, he played dog-in-the-manger too much and helped foster the impression that economics was devoted to “apologetics for the system” rather than to a search for ways to guide constructive social policies.
Agreeing with the COI that we should recruit young and staff the tenure levels largely from local people, I would point out that we have been working at this with a remarkable lack of effective cooperation from outside the Department. As I just mentioned we did acquire Kenen and Becker as assistant professors; but we had no luck in persuading the Administration and ad hoc committees to let us repeat this success. In my time as chairman, we caught a star by converting Albert Hirschman (who accidentally was here without tenure as one-year replacement for Nurkse, on leave), and who was not at the time widely-enough appreciated in the profession. We were unable to hold David Landes on economic history. Two people who in the end proved to be very highly valued outside though when we acquired them they were rank outsiders are Alexander Erlich and Charles Issawi (both of whom were given tenure in my time as chairman). We should remember also that Vickrey (and earlier Barger and Shoup) started at Columbia in Junior ranks. Dewey, Hart, Cagan, Mincer (who however had filled in earlier), Lancaster, Findlay, Phelps, and now Dhrymes, represent recruiting-with-tenure.
What lends poignancy to the question of recruiting-young is that we now have a very distinguished collection of assistant professors — I think the best we’ve had simultaneously in my time at Columbia. But our uniform lack of success with ad hoc committees on promotions of such men (I think Nakamura has been our only promotion to tenure at all recently) creates a situation where we must tell them frankly that we have little hope of keeping them. Such anomalies as two successive years of leave for young Heckman (with serious problems of continuity for students, and loss of the experiential value of a disastrous first-try at reforming the econometrics curriculum) is an extreme example of the kind of handicap for the Department created by the fact that we are morally bound to help our assistant professors make the kind of showing that will get them goods jobs elsewhere — Columbia being unwilling to back us in getting deserved promotions.
Major areas disregarded
Two major areas of professional responsibility in which Columbia has had and must maintain great distinction are simply not mentioned in the COI report. These are the areas of “institutional economics” and of international/regional/developmental economics.
Traditionally, economics in the United States was split into two main camps —those of theoretical and those of “institutionalist” orientation — which maintained an uneasy partnership in the American Economic Association and in many departments. While the titular headquarters of institutionalism was at Wisconsin, its leading center was actually Columbia; and before the sudden recruitment at the end of World War II of a cluster of theoretically-oriented men (Vickrey, Stigler and myself) there was almost a vacuum in Columbia research and instruction on the theoretical side. J. M. Clark (a most distinguished mind whose personals shyness prevented him from being a major influence in face-to-face contact) was a distinguished theoretical thinker, but regarded himself as an institutionalist and had little curricular influence. Hotelling, who was just leaving at the time I came in 1946, was the nearest thing to an active theorist.
A merger of the theoretical and institutionalist schools began to shape up during the 1930’s and was to a considerable extent accomplished during and just after World War II. The terms of merger were much like those for the two meetings of Quakers in New York City, who obviated what might have been an awkward problem of merging properties by having each member of one meeting become a member also of the other! In the 1940’s and 1950’s, it began to look as if nobody could make a career as theorist without also doubling in some other area, and nobody could make a career as institutionalist without also paying serious attention to the theoretical aspects of his problem. But in the end the merger turned out to be slanted in favor of the theorists: it is again possible to make a career by pursuing problems that are trivial variations on theoretical themes; and large elements of the institutional side of economics are allowed to die out. Students doing quantitative work with data have no tradition of asking what their numbers mean in the context of wider social processes and problems.
At Columbia, the tradition that study of law-cases is one important way to understand the economic subject-matter is preserved chiefly by the fortunate fact that we have Dewey teaching “industrial organization”. Economic history was allowed to die out; and while at present we have in assistant professors Edelstein and Passell two excellent specimens of economic historians who are also competent theorists and econometricians, we have no assurances that economic history will not again be blanked out. Some institutional aspects of “economics of human resources” are very much alive in the labor workshop; but large parts of that tradition (including the tradition of trying to understand trade unions and more generally economic organizations other than business firms) seem to have evaporated. History of thought as an approach to economics is now represented almost entirely by Alexander Erlich (who is also our only member who is expert in Marxist economics and in the functioning of European communist economies). While in terms of professional fashions the lack of “institutionalist” instruction will not cause us to lose face in the profession, we should ask whether in bringing up a new generation of economists we should be willing to see the positive aspects of the institutionalist tradition simply evaporate.
The other major aspect of economics which is disregarded in the COI report — though in fact it absorbs much of our staff manpower and is of fundamental importance for many of our students, especially from overseas — is concern with the world outside the United States. We are seriously understaffed in the pivotal area of formal economics of international-trade-and-finance, where Ronald Findlay is saddled with both the responsibilities handled by Kenen and those which were handled by Hirschman. The problems of economic development (or its lack) in the world’s poor countries need and get a lot of attention. [Incidentally, since USA is rapidly evolving “backwards” into a state of underdevelopment, the insights one gets in studying Latin America or Asia become disconcertingly applicable at home!]
The presence at Columbia of a cluster of “regional institutes” has had an important impact on our work in economics. On the whole, the Department has resisted successfully pressures to recruit people who were expert on some “region” but lacked general professional competence. [Before Riskin fortunately turned up, we were under pressure to recruit an economist who combined Chinese language and willingness to function largely as librarian a combination of qualifications which didn’t seem to coexist with all-round professional competence. Bergson, who for years was our “Soviet specialist” was also a distinguished welfare-theorist. Erlich was originally recruited on “soft money” to be an East-Central-Europe specialist; when Bergson left, there was a closing-of-ranks operation which gave him the Russian field — and it has turned out that his knowledge of Marxist economics and of economic thought, and the fact that he is regularly sought out by East European visitors in USA make him a major factor of general departmental strength. At present the nearest equivalents of “mere” area specialists are Issawi (who also handles general instruction in economics in the School of International Affairs, and a good deal of development-and-history work at the dissertation stage), Nakamura and Riskin — all men of great general usefulness. The roles of European and Latin American “regional specialists” are filled by two of our senior general economists — Barger and myself.
While one could imagine a budgetary situation such that one must recommend reducing to a token scale a University’s involvement in this area (except for basic international-trade-and-finance courses), it is hard to believe that Columbia specifically should withdraw from this kind of work. Surely the economic profession in USA has as part of its responsibility an understanding of the economic processes of other countries. [True, I have heard Milton Friedman say that to have a different economics for Brazil as against USA makes no more sense than to have a different science of chemistry; but he simply disregards the ethnocentric character of the economics which inward-looking economists develop for USA, and ignores the risk that what passes for “general economic law” may turn out to be a series of adhockeries concocted to be plausible for a very special and perhaps transitory state of society.] This responsibility surely comes home to Columbia. For one thing, New York is the natural focus of such work, what with its outward-looking tradition and the presence of the UN. Besides, we incur a special responsibility because we have so many overseas students. I would add that to educate overseas students too exclusively in economics-for-USA is dysfunctional: one of the major handicaps of development has been the attempt of US-trained economists overseas to apply Keynesian remedies to unemployment problems of non-Keynesian type, for example.
Economics and the SIA [School of International Affairs]
If the University were very strong financially, it seems to me plain that one would recommend developing the Economics Department in a way that would greatly strengthen the general work on international relations and on the understanding of societies outside USA which is represented by the School of International Affairs. The SIA could advantageously be much more of a research body and center of workshop activity.
I would not recommend developing an economics department within the SIA (even if SIA eventually develops a distinct and separately-recruited faculty, which I don’t think I would recommend either). To set up standards of recruiting, teaching and publication for “SIA economists” that will pass muster with the general profession is an essential safeguard, and the generally low standards of economic thinking in the UN and in overseas universities outside Europe, Japan and Australasia should be a warning that a separate international economics might not be a genuine “discipline”. But it will be a major defeat if Columbia cannot maintain and improve its standard of keeping a stable of economists for whom understanding of outside economies (and especially of the economies of poor countries) is a major concern.
A question which interacts with this, of course, is whether the SIA can develop its own sources of financing, as seemed so probable a few years ago. If not, the general financial debility of the University will mean that we must stop far short of optimum in the whole area represented by SIA, and hence also on its economic side. Specifically, it may make a great difference whether or not SIA can finance workshop activity in this area, and make a role for research posts for young economists (for example, teaching two-thirds time in the Department and working one-third-time-plus-summer in a research branch of SIA).
If the University’s policy toward economics is primarily to develop its mathematical-economics core, the contribution the Department can make on the SIA side may suffer. And reciprocally, failure to develop strength on this side may be a handicap to SIA in its efforts to get backing for a really strong program.
A postscript on professional life-cycles
One of the most valuable pieces of education I picked up in my earlier years at Columbia was a comment by Isador Rabi at a University Seminar about the problems of a field like physics where the most impressive men “peak” very young and the work regarded as important by the profession is done largely by youngsters. It would be a tremendous waste to throw men on the scrap-heap after their “peak” years, or to regard them as living on the benefits of tenure, as non-producers, for most of their profession lifetimes. The solution, Rabl indicated, was surely to be found in an appropriate division of labor between colleagues at different stages of life-cycle, working out what economists call an area of comparative advantage for the older men.
The COI report seems to me to ignore this problem, and to frame problems as if we could hope to recruit good men between age 25 and age 30 and have them conveniently remove themselves (suicide recommended?) along about age 40 — significant activities being described as those appropriate to men aged 25-40. In good part, I think the “problem” of life-cycle (once recognized) and the “problems” of maintaining strength in institutional economics and in the development/regional areas exist largely because we don’t integrate our approaches to different aspects of economics work. To a considerable degree, the natural life-cycle of the economist is to be obsessed with very abstract problems in youth, and mature into a person more concerned with and more knowledgeable about the real world. To a very large degree, the staffing of the institutional fields and of the SIA-type activities should then be handled by shifting over of people who have graduated from being pure theorists. If we don’t do this, the channels of recruiting and promotion for the continuation of the supposedly -central mathematical-economics core are apt to get clogged. It is very tricky to suppose that giving tenure to a theoretically creative young man is to acquire forty years of theoretically creative activity. Most of the relevant people have their key ideas very young, and develop them as fully as is profitable by age 40. If they continue to preempt the key teaching roles in these fields, they will keep the young from advancing and will impair the freshness of the curriculum offered to graduate and undergraduate students. [It was because of this view that I allowed myself to be pushed out of micro-teaching by Becker and Co. in the early 1960’s.] But to suck the tenured men out of these lines and make room for their successors, a Department needs a lot of roles for the maturing older man. Unless we can do well with the institutional and SIA aspects of the field, I conclude, we can’t do well in the long run with the “core” aspects.
Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Joseph Dorfman Collection, Box 13 (Columbia University-teaching, etc.); Folder “Economic H…P…”
Image Source: Obituary in The Columbia Spectator, October 3, 1997.
