Economics in the Rear-View Mirror

The scope of this interdisciplinary course from the mid-1960s is genuinely breathtaking. With his Harvard Ph.D. (1965) still fresh [Thesis: “Decentralized Resources Allocation With a Modicum of Increasing Returns.”], Stephen Marglin was on his famed meteoric rise to tenured professorship when he co-taught the following course on public investmen with political scientists ...

He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches; he who cannot do or teach, teaches methodology. Just kidding…Professor Thomas Nixon Carver taught just about everything in the Harvard economics department except for economic history, money and banking, public finance, and international trade. Economic theory, agricultural economics, distribution, social policy, sociology, and sc...

The following manuscript was fished from Abba Lerner’s papers. The cover letter indicates that Hyman Minsky was going to be heading East for the Southern Economics Association meetings and was hoping to combine that with the search for new graduate students for Washington University and a bit of self-promotion of his support for the McGovern Presidential campaign. Minsky ...

A highly popular vocational course offering for Harvard undergraduates was William M. Cole’s principles of accounting. This post provides us with the course description, enrollment figures, and semester exams for the 1912-13 academic year.

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The Harvard economics department’s rocky relationship with its visiting committee chairman in 1950 has been documented in earlier posts. The friction continued for at least a decade as can be seen from the not-so-gentle reminder from 1961. The business folks on th...