John Lodewijks

Anthropologists and economists: conflict or cooperation?

Economists have sought little systematic help from economic anthropology. Some of the reasons for this neglect can be gleaned from a study of the history of economic anthropology and in monitoring the reaction of economists to these efforts. The substantivist-formalist methodological debate and the fieldwork of some modern development economists are examined. There are some indications that the interaction between economists and anthropologists might be moving in a more productive direction.

Is Academic Economics Withering in Australia

Departments of economics in Australia have not fared well recently. Many have been closed, merged or relocated, their staff made redundant while economics degrees and majors have been eliminated. This article tries to understand why academic economics appears to be withering in this country, or at least increasingly concentrated in Group of Eight (Go8) universities, and what if anything can still be done to preserve what is left.

THE ET INTERVIEW: PROFESSOR JAN KMENTA

Jan Kmenta is the author of the internationally respected text The Elements of Econometrics [1] and co-editor of several books related to econometric model building. His published research over 40 years relates to many facets of econometric theory and practice, including the estimation of production functions, the evaluation of structural econometric models, and estimation in the face of missing data. This work has appeared in the leading journals of the profession. A 1966 paper [11] is of historical interest for being the second econometric model constructed of the Australian economy. In his work, through both constructive contributions and methodological critique, he has always sought to highlight and advance the evidently close connection between economics and econometrics. Kmenta was born on January 3, 1928, in Prague, the Czech Republic. He was educated at the Jirasek State Gymnasium in Prague (1939–47) and the Czech University of Technology in Prague (1947–49). At the University of Sydney (1952–55), Australia, he graduated with a Bachelor of Economics degree (First Class Honors). He obtained a Master of Arts degree (1959) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1964) from Stanford University with a doctoral dissertation entitled “Australian Postwar Immigration: An Econometric Study.” After teaching stints in Australia, Stanford, and Wisconsin, he taught at Michigan State from 1965 to 1973 and at the University of Michigan from 1973 to 1993. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Economics and Statistics, University of Michigan, and Visiting Professor, CERGE-EI, Charles University, Prague. His various academic awards and prizes include the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award for Senior U.S. Scientists, the Michigan Economic Society Best Professor Award, the Royal Economic Society Lecturer at the University of Leicester, and the Karel Englis Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Saarland, Germany, and served as associate editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association (1973–1979 and 1985–1992), associate editor, Review of Economics and Statistics (1975–1992), and associate editor, Metrika (1981–1985). Kmenta was listed as 40th among all economists ranked by the total number of citations (Medoff 1989 ). This is an edited transcript of two tape-recorded interviews conducted with Professor Kmenta in Sydney on March 12, 2004, as he visited the University of New South Wales to present the seminar Econometrics: A Failed Science? I am indebted to one of Kmentas former students, Eric Sowey, for suggesting this project and for his enthusiasm and support throughout.

Alternative Structures and Teaching Modes for a Multi-campus University

The single campus university structure is a traditional model in that all the teaching, research and administrative units are located at one place. However, with the growth of population and the expansion of the geographical area of a city, it becomes necessary either to extend the activities of an existing university to other locations, or to start new universities or to convert existing higher education institutions into universities. This has happened in many countries particularly during the last couple of decades. For one or the other reason, multi-campus universities are on the rise. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to discuss alternative organizational structures that may have a bearing on overall administrative and allocative efficiency, and (2) to critically examine the merits and demerits of alternative teaching modes that these universities can adopt.

Macroeconometric Models and the Methodology of Macroeconomics

“The stimulation given by the General Theory to the construction and testing of aggregative models may well prove to be Keyness chief contribution to economics in the longer perspective of historical judgement.”

Training Professional Economists: The Australian Experience

My first acquaintance with Ray Petridis occurred more than twenty years ago. I had just finished an Honours degree at the University of Sydney and was embarking on a Masters degree at the University of New England. Ray came and gave a staff seminar on ‘Economists in a Federal System’. He was on the lecture circuit with this paper that was part of an international study of ‘Economists in Government’ coordinated by A.W. Coats and later published as a book by Duke University Press and as a special issue of the History of Political Economy (Petridis 1981). Little did I then realise that I would be replicating Ray’s professional training by doing a PhD at the same institution (Duke University), having the same supervisor (Craufurd Goodwin) and later also working on economists in government (in my case, Arthur Okun). Indeed, one of my first tasks as editorial assistant for HOPE was to help with the publication of the Coats volume that included the Petridis paper. Petridis (1981) examined, in a considered and scholarly way, the role and impact of the large number of graduates in economics employed by Australian governments. This work predated by a decade the publication by Michael Pusey on Economic Rationalism in Canberra that was to generate so much controversy and ill-feeling. The ensuing debate on economic rationalism ‘at best led to some misconceptions about economics and economic policies. At its worst, the argument has degenerated into diatribe’ (King and Lloyd 1993, p. vii). Petridis concluded that his research led to a basically positive view of the contribution of economics graduates. However, there was some disquiet about the overuse of economic analysis for essentially social problems and a lack of pragmatism on the part of graduates. Moreover, it was felt that a ‘multidisciplinary approach should be cultivated which would help to counter the tendency to perceive particular problems through the narrow lens of a single specialism’ (Petridis 1981, p. 432). In this chapter I take up some of these themes but from the perspective of the nature of postgraduate training in economics. I examine the purposes of postgraduate education and the role of economics in preparing students for academic and other employment options. The scope for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the international dimension reshaping postgraduate education, lead to proposals for improving the learning process at the postgraduate level.

Failure by Design: The Story Behind America's Broken Economy

tutional theorizing and social order, rather than a problem to be assumed away. The connections drawn by Aligica between the Ostroms’ concepts of polycentricity, resilience and predictability raise doubts about the ability of benevolent and omniscient actors to engineer centralized, technocratic and bureaucratic solutions to the problems of governance. Aligica’s message, built upon foundations laid by the Ostroms, is that ‘self-governing, fallible, but capable human beings [must] master the “art and science of association”’ (p. 204) in order to transform, through constitutional craftsmanship, situations of social conflict into the conditions for social cooperation.