Economics and Finance: the Evolution of Economic Science
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MIT 150 | Economics and Finance: The Evolution of Economic Science POTERBA: Good morning. As many of you may guess, I am not, as your program suggests, Dean Deborah Fitzgerald. She will be joining us and welcoming all of you this afternoon as we start into the second half of our program today. But as Jim Poterba and one of the organizers of the events that we will be going through in the next day and a half, I want to thank you all for braving the snow this morning. I want to thank David and the members of the MIT 150 committee for selecting the Economics Department in the Sloan School to sponsor this symposium. And I would like to thank both the dean of the Sloan School and the dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences for agreeing to support this exciting adventure. When MIT was founded in 1861, the field of political economy was already taking shape as a well-defined academic discipline. The leading text was John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, which had been published in 1848. And although in the very early years, economics was not yet on the radar screen of MIT, it arrived soon in the history of the young institution. In 1880, when Francis Amasa Walker was recruited from Yale to come and serve as the third president of MIT, that was a rather unusual thing for an institution of science and technology because Walker was, actually, one of, along with Irving Fisher at Yale, the most distinguished economists in the United States at that point. And Walker would go on to serve as the first president of the American Economic Association for a period of six years in the 1880s. He'd be the president of the American Statistical Association for a span of 17 years in the 1880s and 1890s. And he introduced the first required undergraduate course in economics, or political economy, here at MIT in the 1880s. So the history of economics and the role of economics in MIT'S fundamental fabric goes way back before the origins of the PhD program that MIT created in the early 1940s. I thought as one way of getting a perspective to introduce and set the stage for this 150-year perspective on economics at MIT, it might be useful to hear a little bit about some of the questions that emerged in the early Francis Amasa Walker course, so that showed up on the exams that we have from that era, and to give you a sense of how economics has changed or not changed as the case may be. In 1895, the exam included the question how are the debts between nations settled? What determines the value of gold? A question that certainly seems to have relevance today. In 1896, the year when the bimetalism controversy was raging, how and when may mortgage indebtedness press upon the farmer, and compare the effects of such indebtedness in different parts of the United States? The role of mortgages in the US seems to have been an issue again in the more recent past. And to link to tomorrow's finance symposium, I found this fascinating. The 1896 exam asks illustrate by an example the use of an option by a manufacturer to protect himself against the speculative changes in the price of his raw materials. It actually uses the phrase option in what shows up on the exam. Walker passed away in 1897. Davis R. Dewey, who served as editor of theA merican Economic Review for over 30 years and was another key figure in the history of the MIT Economics Department, continued to teach the political economy course. In 1898, he asked, for example, what arguments have been advanced in favor of a tax on inheritances? Again, a question that nearly 110 years later, we don't quite seem to have settled. Although some issues have changed. In 1899, the question, what are the principal economic advantages of employing children in factories does seem to have [LAUGHTER] moved off the stage. Demonstrating that economists then as now have two hands and have difficulty reaching conclusions, in May of 1901, the exam asked, mention six arguments in favor of the imposition of a protective tariff. In the fall 1901, the next semester, the course asked, what arguments have been advanced against protective tariff duties? We don't have an answer sheet to these exams, unfortunately. We just have the questions. So the history of MIT, as I said, is intertwined with the role of economics. The course then was called Political Economy and Industrial History. And it was basically trying to offer the students an opportunity to learn about the behavior of firms, the role of firms in the economy, and, of course, the role of consumers who are the demanders of those products. And that will provide a focal point for us as we organize our first session this morning. The quick thumbnail sketch going forward from the turn of the 20th century, of course, is probably well known. In 1940, MIT introduced a Master's program in economics moving from a service department offering the undergraduates an exposure to economics to a department that was then focused more on research and graduate training. A year later, introduced a PhD program. Lawrence Klein, who taught for many years at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first graduate student went on to win the Nobel Prize-- not a bad start for a fledgling PhD program. And the rest, in some sense, is history. In the post-war period, MIT, with a band of loyal and dedicated faculty, developed a PhD program which truly transformed the teaching of economics and made MIT a center of research activity in economics that attracted students and faculty from around the world, and has really been a central part of the post-war economics policy theory and educational mission in the broader economics profession. And that in, many ways, is what we are here today to celebrate-- the contributions that MIT as an institution, MIT students, and MIT's faculty have made to the advance of economic science, economic policy, and the design of economic institutions. Today's program is broken into four components. We will begin this morning with a focus on the evolution of economic theory, both at the micro household level and firm level as well as on the understanding of macroeconomics. This afternoon, we'll switch gears to a somewhat more applied focus on macro policy and on regulatory policy. And we have an all-star cast of speakers who will be sharing their thoughts on a variety of these issues with us as we work our way through the day. What I would like to do is to basically introduce our speakers for this morning's panel and then simply to allow them to take charge and to handle their presentations. We have, by the way, set up some microphones in the audience. And we will have time for some questions and answers at the end of the presentation today, so that I hope we'll be able to draw some audience participation. Let me just introduce our panelists as my final task this morning George Akerlof, who will lead off, is the Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He's a 1966 PhD from the Economics Department here at MIT. His work in information economics and more broadly in macroeconomics and behavioral economics has cast an incredibly important influence on the evolution of economic thinking in the last few decades. His paper on the market for lemons has been a perennial favorite both with undergraduates and has had a central role in teaching all of us how to think about the research frontier in information economics. He received the Nobel Prize in 2001, shared the Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of information economics. And he will actually be talking about the role of norms in economics with some illustrations from the field of [INAUDIBLE] Avinash Dixit from Princeton University, the John J. F. Sherrerd University Professor, Emeritus, will be our second speaker. He received his PhD here at MIT in 1968. He is a past president of both the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association. He is a modeler par none who has an unbelievable capacity to distill a range of economic problems to their essence, to construct models which illustrate them, and to enlighten the broader profession and students about the workings of international trade, of growth theory, of a number of different disciplines. He will actually speak about the role of MIT's small models approach to doing economic theory and the influence that it has had on a number of different fields and on the evolution of our disciplines. Jerry Housman, the John and Jennie MacDonald Professor of Economics here at MIT, will be our third speaker. Jerry is an applied microeconomist and an econometrician who received the John Bates Clark medal in the early 1980s for his work in bringing microeconometric tools to bear on a roll of different questions, taxes and labor supply, telecommunications, the role of transfer programs in effecting household behavior. Jerry has blazed a trail which has taught a generation or two generations of economists how to use the theory that we learn in our theory courses and the econometrics and statistical methods that we learn in our econometrics courses, to bring them together to enlighten our understanding of household and firm behavior.