Economics in the Rear-View Mirror

This post completes the collection of course descriptions, enrollments, and final exams for Harvard economics courses from the 1912-13 academic year with an advanced course in economic history. The course was attended by four Harvard male graduate students and one Radcliffe woman (presumably also a graduate student) and covered European economic life from mediaev...

What is the secret ingredient that has made the University of Chicago so outstanding? Milton Friedman identified it as “an undeviating emphasis on quality alone” — other nice stuff like balance and diversity are merely by-products from pursuing the single mandate of quality.

______________________________

In my opinion Thomas C. Schelling (1921-2016) has achieved something greater than the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (2005). The history of economics will remember him as the very model of a modern thinking economist’s economist.

The earlier post for the reading list and final exams from his

Before he went off to the University of Wisconsin to study economics, Harvard’s professor of economics for public finance and the history of economics, Charles J. Bullock, taught high-school Latin and Greek. I wonder who would have been among the last American-born economists able to read Xenophon in the original. 

The mid-year and year-end exams for Bullo...

By chance I found the announcement of Robert Clower’s appointment to chair the Northwestern economics department while pimping out the 1958 syllabus for his course on income and employment theory. Some academics are born to be chair, some achieve that chair status, while others need to have the job of chair thrust upon them.

Once you have digested that amu...