Bradley W. Bateman

Keynes's Changing Conception of Probability

One of the most actively discussed aspects of Keyness thought during the last decade has been his concern with uncertainty and probability theory. As the concerns of current macroeconomic theorists have turned increasingly to the effects of expectations and uncertainty, interest has grown in the fact that Keynes was the author of A Treatise on Probability (1921) and that uncertainty plays a prominent role in Chapter 12 of The General Theory as well as in three 1937 papers in which he summarized The General Theorys main point. Not surprisingly, though, there has been very little agreement in this recent discussion about exactly what the significance of Keyness early work in probability was to his later work as an economist, or about what the roles of uncertainty and expectations are in The General Theory.

The Cambridge companion to Keynes

1. A cunning purchase: the life and work of Maynard Keynes Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman 2. The Keynesian revolution in economic theory Roger Backhouse 3. Keynes and the birth of modern macroeconomics David Laidler 4. Keynes as a Marshallian Axel Leijonhufvud 5. Doctor Keynes: economic theory in a diagonistic science Kevin Hoover 6. Keynes and economic policy George Peden 7. Keynes and Cambridge Maria Cristina Marcuzzo 8. Keynes and his correspondence Donald Moggridge 9. Keynes and philosophers Tiziano Raffaelli 10. Keynes and probability Donald Gillies 11. Keynes and ethics Thomas Baldwin 12. The art of an ethical life: Keynes and Bloomsbury Craufurd Goodwin 13. Keynes between modernism and post modernism Matthias Klaes 14. Keyness political philosophy Samuel Brittan 15. Keynes and Keynesianism Bradley Bateman.

Race, Intellectual History, and American Economics: A Prolegomenon to the Past

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, following the formation of the American Economic Association (AEA), professional academic economics in the United States became the home for a very blunt and ugly racism. This fact has been well documented in articles by Robert Cherry (1976, 1980) and byYngve Ramstad and James Starkey (1995).1 Some of the earliest publications of the AEA are overtly racist, and the early issues of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy are peppered with articles that depict the Negro race as inferior.2 Perhaps the most egregious example of this early genre of writing on race by American economists is Frederick Hoffman’s “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro” (1896), which was the tenth publication in the early series that ultimately became the American Economic Review. If you have Hoffman’s tract in your university’s library, it is bound together with the eleventh publication in that early

Keynes and the Welfare State

This paper considers the question of what influence J.M. Keynes had on the evolution of the welfare state after the Second World War. First it weighs whether his non-utilitarian approach to economic theory and welfare measurement had an impact on the growth of the welfare state. Then it considers whether the influence came through Keynes’s advocacy of deficit spending. After rejecting both of these explanations the role of full employment in sustaining the welfare state is weighed. The paper concludes with a consideration of what might be necessary in preserving the welfare state in the face of the recent financial crisis and the sovereign debt crises that have emerged subsequent to the crisis.

Keynes and Capitalism

We analyze Keyness thoughts on capitalism by focusing on what he wrote on the topic, using the Collected Writings, taken as a whole, together with some unpublished material to tackle three issues: what Keynes meant by capitalism; the fragility of capitalism; and the morality of capitalism. In doing this, we juxtapose materials written at different stages of his career. While the context and the theoretical framework within which Keynes developed his economic thinking changed substantially, our argument is that beneath these many changes in his circumstances and analytical frame lay a remarkably consistent attitude toward capitalism, an attitude in which morality was central. This view of capitalism is linked with the personal values that animated his life, especially the values that he shared with the other members of Bloomsbury.

Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution

During the last 15 years, while economists and historians of economic thought have kept their gaze focused on Maynard Keynes’s theoretical work a host of other scholars has been trying to put him in a fuller, historical context. As historians, political scientists, sociologists, and economic historians have turned their attention to the question of how demand management became institutionalized in the Western democracies they have made some startling discoveries.1

The Reception of Marshall in the United States

This is a unique and detailed book which surveys the diffusion and reception of Alfred Marshall’s ideas and the ways they have influenced the development of economic science up to the present day.

2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS REFLECTIONS ON THE SECULARIZATION OF AMERICAN ECONOMICS

The genre of the History of Economics Society presidential address is not fixed. As some of my predecessors have observed, the early genre fluctuated between those who used the occasion to lament the state of our discipline and those used it to speak on an area of their own scholarly expertise. I am happy to say, however, that in recent years the lament has largely disappeared and people have focused more and more on pure questions of scholarship. In the last three presidential addresses, my immediate predecessors have each used the occasion to speak to a facet of their own work and, in each, to push the frontier out a little further. Last year, Wade Hands posed a question at the beginning of his address, regarding the similarities between mainstream philosophy of science and mainstream economics between 1945 and 1965 and then used the occasion to convince us that the question was worth our attention and to sketch out three possible answers to the question. The year before that, Mary Morgan spoke to us about the evolution of models of ‘‘economic man,’’ demonstrating convincingly that the nature of the human being depicted in models had become thin and etiolated over time. The year before that, Roy Weintraub discussed how the focus of our historical research may be influenced by our own biographies. In one way or another, all three of these addresses dealt with an issue at the heart of the scholar’s recognized work and then pressed into new territory. In general, I would like to follow in this more recent tradition of focusing on a scholarly question and using the occasion to push into some questions and issues that are new. However, at the end I would like to add a final twist that is, I believe, somewhat different. 1

WHY INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS MATTERS AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

By now, it is one of the standard tropes of those who write about the professionalization of American economics that there was a methodenstreit between the marginalists and the historicists at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. As recently as last year, Nancy Cohen (2002) argued that the only problem with this picture is that we have not understood correctly that the marginalists had actually won much sooner than we realized, sometime before 1900. Dorothy Ross’s classic The Origins of Amercian Social Science (1991) plays off the same dichotomy, but offers the older chronology, that “[b]etween about 1890 and 1910 marginal economics became the dominant paradigm in American economics.”

There are Many Alternatives: Margaret Thatcher in the History of Economic Thought

The last twenty-five years of the twentieth century were freighted with important moments for historians of economic thought: the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, the rise (and fall) of monetarism, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the other Marxist-Leninist states in central and eastern Europe, the rise of neo-liberalism, and arguments over the possible emergence of a “New Economy†following the internet investment boom at the end of the 1990s. Each of these moments will require its own history as we slowly move away from the tumult of the times and begin to weigh them for their own significance. But several of the moments have a common iconic face in Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. Few other individuals so readily embody the sense of the times. Thatchers election—a full year and a half before Ronald Reagans—marks for many people the moment when Keynesian policies finally and irretrievably lost their legitimacy. Likewise, the timing of her election, just two months before Paul Volckers selection as the chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the United States, also means that for many people Thatchers is the public face of monetarisms ascendancy. Finally, there is probably no one person whose name is so clearly associated with the rise of free market thinking and neo-liberalism during the end of the twentieth century.