Economic Principles: The Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics Book

Contents

Introduction

1. First Principals

The Sex Lives of Great Economists

Adam Smith: The Canniest Scot

Redeeming Karl Marx

Keynes: Yes, He Was a Genius, but Was He Right?

Marx, Keynes and Who?

Emerson: The Philosopher of the Business Class

Aldo Leopold: The Common Vision of Economics and Ecology

Frederic Bastiat: For the Provisioning of Moscow

The Search for Kondratieff's Wave

The New Palgrave: Smelly Cheese for Roquefort Addicts

Alsager's Heirs

On "Tech-ing It Up"

Sand Sketches and Skyscrapers

Short-term Sacrifices and Long-term Gains

The Wizard of Ec?

Scientists See Vast Changes

2. The Older Generation

The Original (Lorie Tarshis)

How Economics Went High-Tech (Cowles Commission)

Enfant Terrible-Emeritus (Paul Samuelson)

A Bunch of Kids with Adding Machines (Lawrence Klein)

Milton Friedman's Surprising Secret

The Professor of "Q" (James Tobin)

First Jeff, Now Mutt (George Stigler)

A Victory for the Pure Theory Chapter (Gerard Debreu)

"Most Will Not Know Who He Is" (Richard Stone)

The Architect of the Life-Cycle(Franco Modigliani)

The Skeptic's Reward (James Buchanan)

Regulating Government (Gordon Tullock)

The Man Who Discovered "Technical Change" (Robert Solow)

For What He Did in the War (Maurice Allais)

Gone Fishin' (Trygve Haavelmo)

Finance Comes of Age (Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, William Sharpe)

The Long Patrol (Ronald Coase)

When the Revolution Really Was a Dinner Party (Ronald Coase)

Why You Never Heard of George Dantzig

Planning, Hayek, and the CTC (Friedrich Hayek)

Why Galbraith Won't Receive the Nobel Prize (John Kenneth Galbraith)

From the Chess Set to Project Tipster (Herbert Simon)

How the PC Did in the Big Forecasters (Otto Eckstein)

The Enthusiast (Dale Jorgenson)

A Theory of Everything? (Gary Becker)

Janos Kornai: The System Viewed from the East

The Hidden History of the National Bureau (John Meyer)

The Man Who Wrote Books (Charles P. Kindleberger)

An Economy Without a Middle? (Robert Averitt)

How a Nuclear Strategist Switched to Climate Change (Thomas Schelling)

Hepburn Retires and Is Not Replaced, as Tracy Soldiers On (Caroline Shaw Bell)

The Many Lives of Marshall Goldman

How Waltham Lost Its Watch Trade (David Landes)

The Economics of Journals (George Borts)

Was Oil Ever Really Scarce? (M.A. Adelman)

In Which Japan, like Greenland, Shrinks Some (Robert Summers)

The Possibilitarian (Albert Hirschman)

3. The Younger Generation

The New New Economics (Paul Krugman)

"The Bureau," Feldstein's Power Base (Martin Feldstein)

The Nobleman Who Stooped to Trade (Franklin Fisher)

The Odd Genius Behind "Supply-Side" Economics (Robert Mundell)

The Economics of Status: An Old Idea, Re-examined (Robert Frank)

The Agency Theory in a Real World (Richard Zeckhauser and John Pratt)

How the Bra Was Invented and Other Useful Lessons (Jose Scheinkman)

Welfare Reform? Or Growth? (David Ellwood)

The Case for Profit-Sharing (Martin Weitzman)

The Computer Who Cried Wolf (William Nordhaus)

The "New Classical" School's First Textbook (Robert Barro)

A Primer for Democrats Seeking Policy (Edmund Phelps)

Why the Mighty Fall (Mancur Olson)

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Truth About Taxes (David Bradford)

The Thief of Baghdad, Explained (Reuven Brenner)

Why Bureaucrats Prefer Quotas (James Anderson)

Which Model for Eastern Europe? (David Ellerman)

DRI's New Man for the '80s (Roger Brinner)

The Games That Nations Play (Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff)

How to Stop Cream-Skimming in Health Care (Peter Diamond)

First Thing We Do, Optimize the Lawyers (Stephen Magee)

A Bully Pulpit for Dukakis' Economist in the Bush Administration (Larry Summers)

Is a Class War in the Offing? (Lawrence Katz and Kevin Murphy)

Economists Take Sides on Trade (Jagdish Bhagwati)

"Big Bang" vs. Evolution (Peter Murrell)

What We Know (and Don't Know) About the '80s (Andrei Schleifer and Robert Vishny)

Political Economy of the First Amendment (Richard Posner)

A New Generation of Democratic Policy Intellects (the CBO)

Reports of the Death of the Middle Class Are Exaggerated (Frank Levy)

Divided, Conquered (Uwe Rheinhardt)

The Winner's Curse (Richard Thaler)

Living as a "Diminished Giant" (Jagdish Bhagwati)

The Third Coast (fresh-water economics)

Yankees Resplendent, Celtics Rebuilding (Cambridge economics)

The Self-lnventors: Clinton's Advisers

4. Engineers

After the Crash (financial engineering)

Rocket Science and Its Dilemmas Are Here to Stay (conflicts of interest)

The Money Launderers Stay a Step Ahead (Ingo Walter)

Wall Street: An Oral History (Gilbert Kaplan)

Where Ignorant Armies Trade by Night (Stewart Myers)

A Graduate School for Little Capitalists (James Cloonan)

When 2 + 2 = 3 (Michael Porter)

Buy This Junk Bond! Don't Break the Chain! (Paul Asquith)

Weird Economics (the Santa Fe Institute)

Building a New Zoo (Albert Wojnilower)

A "Strong" Man for the Fed? (Gerald Corrigan)

At the Head of the Queue (Jeffrey Busen)

How the Financial Markets Went High-Tech (Peter Bernstein)

Dau! Dau! Dau! (Oliver Stone)

5. Critics

Das Appropriation Problem (Philip Mirowski)

What the Fuss Was About (Arjo Klamer)

The Woody Guthrie of Economics (Seymour Melman)

The Bear in My Closet (Robert Reich)

Trust-Buster in the Idea Business (Donald McCloskey)

Too Little Knowledge: Too Much Leverage (Andrew Kamarck)

Never Mind the Second Law (Julian Simon and Herman Daly)

Against the Weapons Biz (Walter lsard and Kenneth Boulding)

Medicine for Hurry Sickness (Michael Young)

Building Pandaemonium (Humphrey Jennings)

A Son Charts His Own Course (James Galbraith)

On the Issue of the Whole and Its Parts (computational complexity)

Telling the Wants from the Wanters (Julie Matthaei)

In Which John Kenneth Galbraith Goes Soft on the Corporation and Has Tea

Why Do We Work So Hard? (Juliet Schor)

A Voice from the Economic Left (Michael Piore)

Questing for the "Bionomic Perspective" (Michael Rothschild)

Species Goldbug, Genus Crank (Howard Katz)

Is There Life Before Death? (Staffan Linder)

6. Neighbors

Much More than Just a Common Scold (Jane Jacobs)

Thomas Kuhn: Paradigm Gained -- and Lost

A Noble Story of Technological Change

Francis Reintjes: Reconstructing an Engineering Revolution

America: Democracy to Bureaucracy? (John Lukacs)

A Knack for "Thick Description" (Theodore Levitt)

The Conference Room as the Symbol of the Times (James Beniger)

Lessons from the Game of "Life" (Peter Albin)

How Long Did Mass Production Last? (David Hounshell)

Frank Talk About Class from Granola Valley? (Benjamin DeMott)

On the Economic Significance of Noam Chomsky

The Odyssey of George Lodge

Robert Nozick and the Zigzag of Politics

"Somebody's Got to Take the Responsibility!" (Robert Keohane)

Rebuilding Beirut (Robert Clark)

A Philadelphia Story (Thomas Hughes)

A Visual Strunk and White (Edward Tufte)

Astronomers, Ragpickers and J. Maynard Keynes (Stephen Gudeeman)

Reflections on "Belindia" (Adam Przeworski)

The Kennedy School Tries Again (Graham Allison)

What Do Corporations Want? (Michael Useem)

"The Cumulated Complexity of a Coral Reef" (James Coleman)

7. Practitioners

The Reflective Practitioners (Donald Schoen)

Why the "Greenhouse Plan" Fell Through (Ira Magaziner)

Of Kings, Cabbages and Robert Reich (Stephen Sass)

Why Oxford and Cambridge Want B-Schools (Alfred Chandler, Michael Porter)

About Commitment (Pankaj Ghemawat)

Preachy Inventors, Inventive Preachers (entrepreneur contests)

The Case of a Supersonic Reactor (Moshe Alamaro)

In Praise of a New Hero (Jack Bennett)

A Man of Girders and Concrete (Frank Davidson)

New Thoughts on Liquidity (Harry Ernst)

When Businessmen Turn Preachers (Ralph Landau)

Tom Peters: Between Arrogance and Terror

The Second Draft of History (John Naisbitt)

Coupon-Clipper Economics (Paul Hawken)

How One Company Died (Max Holland)

Acknowledgments

Index of Names