Robert Van Horn

The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research

The early 1980s constituted a watershed in science, mainly concerning the extent and nature of globalization and commercialization of scientific research, and its impact upon the university. Considerable debate has arisen about the sources of this transition, but aside from a few lone voices, the scholarly literature has neglected the concurrent rise of the contract research organization (CRO) and its role in the commercialization of scientific research. The CRO warrants wider attention as a modern paradigm of privatized science in the biopharmaceutical sector. In discussing the CRO’s technologies, the purposes they pursue, and the legal and policy initiatives that have fostered their rapid rise, we confront the wider implications of the modern regime of commercialized science for the future conduct of scientific research. We identify five areas of innovation: treatment of human subjects, control of disclosure, subjection of research tools to commercialization, redefinition of authorship, and re-engineering the goals of research.

Inland empire: economics imperialism as an imperative of Chicago neoliberalism

Recent work such as Steven Levitts Freakonomics has prompted economic methodologists to reevaluate the state of relations between economics and its neighboring disciplines. Although this emerging literature on ‘economics imperialism’ has its merits, the positions advanced within it have been remarkably divergent: some have argued that economics imperialism is a fiction; others that it is a fact attributable to the triumph of neoclassical economics; and yet others that the era of economics imperialism is over. We believe the confusion results in part from a lack of historical understanding about the nature and aims of economics imperialists. We seek to improve historical understanding by focusing on the activities of a cadre of economists at the epicenter of economics imperialism, the University of Chicago. These activities – led, in the first instance, by Aaron Director and, in the second, by George Stigler – stemmed from the effort to forge a new liberalism or a ‘neoliberalism.’ We then consider Steven Levitts Freakonomics in light of the insights gained from our historical study. Our analysis leads us to question each of the three positions on economics imperialism held by economic methodologists.

HAYEK’S UNACKNOWLEDGED DISCIPLE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP OF F. A. HAYEK AND AARON DIRECTOR (1945–1950)

None of the existing scholarly literature has explored or appreciated Director’s great respect for Hayek or their relationship. This paper explores the relationship of Hayek and Director and argues that Director should be viewed as a disciple of Hayek in the immediate postwar period. Newly available archival material in the Director Papers at the University of Chicago as well as material in the Hayek Papers allow for a deeper appreciation of their relationship than was previously possible. The archival record indicates that the central arc of their relationship occurred from 1945 to roughly 1950, when they heavily corresponded and primarily focuses on this pivotal time period. Through exploring the relationship of Hayek and Director, this paper challenges the frequent claim that Hayek did not influence the postwar Chicago School and argues that starting in 1946, Hayek, even though he was not yet at Chicago, influenced the initial intellectual trajectory of the postwar Chicago School through his disciple Director.

What Would Adam Smith Have on His iPod? Uses of Music in Teaching the History of Economic Thought

In this paper, we examine two ways that we use music — i.e., popular songs lyrics — as an active learning technique in an undergraduate HET course. First, we use music to help students grasp the ideas of the great thinkers in economics and see their relevance today. Second, since we require students to read original texts and write thesis-driven essays, we use music to teach essential skills related to such assignments. While our paper focuses on how we use music as a pedagogical device to teach the HET, the use of music to teach essential skills could be applied to any economics course in which students engage in higher-level reading and writing.

Contending perspectives in one department

Barones 1991 essay stimulated a debate in our economics department. Two department members at the time, Yngve Ramstad and Richard McIntyre, proposed to reorganise the undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree to emphasise contending perspectives. When this proposal was rejected, Ramstad then changed his (required) history of thought course to a contending perspectives course with a significant history of thought component. McIntyre has taught the course since 2008, and in 2010, in rotation with Robert Van Horn who joined the faculty in Fall 2009. The Competing Traditions course emphasises the acquisition of skills rather than the deconstruction of orthodox theory. We explain this shift in three steps: first through an interpretation of the initial departmental debate; second, by exploring student feedback on concrete learning goals and forms of assessment; and finally by considering two reflective essays, each by a university alumnus.

Henry Simons’s Death

In spite of disagreement over whether or not Henry Simons committed suicide, no one has written about the circumstances surrounding his death. The purpose of this essay is to draw from archival material—much of which has been recently unearthed—to examine Simons’s death in detail. This essay enriches the debate over the nature of Simons’s death by offering an account that brings together evidence that sheds light on the circumstances surrounding it. This evidence suggests that a grave disappointment Simons faced the day before he died contributed to his death and helps explain why Simons’s colleagues who asserted that he committed suicide waited nearly forty years before doing so. The article concludes by offering an interpretation of the archival evidence.

Harry Aaron Director: The Coming of Age of a Reformer Skeptic (1914–24)

This article concentrates on the life of Aaron Director at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon (1914–21), and at Yale University (1921–24). Its primary purposes are to examine the juvenilia of Director in order to analyze the evolution of his worldview and to shed light on Directors life at this time through the use of archival and secondary sources. Tracing the evolution of Directors worldview leads to three claims. First, Director maintained that the individual or an elite group of individuals was the catalyst for social change and expressed skepticism toward governing structures as means to make improvements in society. Second, Director believed that open-minded educators who challenged social injustice and prejudice were essential for social and economic reform. Third, Director adopted the critical and skeptical social philosophy of Thorstein Veblen and H. L. Mencken. In conclusion, this essay maintains that the worldview of Directors youth motivated and empowered his postwar efforts at Chicago.

Capitalist Threads: Engels the Businessman and Marx's Capital

This essay illuminates a neglected aspect of Friedrich Engelss life: his work at his familys textile firm, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry in the mid-nineteenth century. We argue that Engels was a merchant and an intelligencer with a detailed, comprehensive understanding of products and the movements of goods, orders, and prices in the global cotton trade. The statistical insights Engels gleaned on matters such as machinery depreciation and reinvestment, his contextualization of capitalism within a unified world market, and his recognition of the tendencies toward overproduction that threatened economic crisis, all contributed to shaping key ideas and themes of Karl Marxs Capital Volumes I and II, leaving a lasting imprint on Marxist political economy.

The Chicago School(s) of Democratic Capitalism

Our main contention is that two different re-conceptualizations of liberal democracy took place among Chicago economists in the postwar period. The first emerged out of Frank H. Knight’s ruminations in the 1930s on the failures of liberalism. By the 1940s, Knight devoted most of his attention to the question of whether rational norms for intelligent democratic action could provide a means of avoiding those failures. The second came in the early 1950s when Aaron Director gave up both the classical liberalism of his predecessor Henry Simons and Knight’s re-conceptualization. Although both Knight and Director viewed liberalism as flawed, they sought solutions to its inadequacies in different ways. While Director asserted the fundamental role of competition in the economic realm, Knight argued that an appreciation for competition must be accompanied by recognition of the equally fundamental roles of discussion and ethics.A subsidiary contention is that Director’s re-formulation provided the underlying conception of democracy in the subsequent work of the Chicago School. While Knight may have taught the Chicago economists price theory, his emphasis on democratic discussion and ethics, coupled with their commitment to the competitive order, diminished his importance to the emerging Chicago approach. Our argument, therefore, lends support to the view that Knight played a smaller role, and Director a more important role, in the Chicago School’s development than often thought.

Introduction to the Symposium on the Contributions of Business to Economics

Historians of economics have largely overlooked the role of businesses in the formation of economic ideas. Indeed, this is true even of historians who are most attuned to the crucial role non-economists have played in shaping the ideas and practices of economics. For example, in his (1999) essay: “How should we write the history of twentieth-century economics?” Roy Weintraub omits any mention of the role of businesspersons. In keeping with his own work, Weintraub urges historians to examine not only the theoretical ideas, but also how these ideas have been translated across the economics profession into communities comprising administrators and policymakers. He emphasizes: “Discussing economic thought in the twentieth century from this perspective would encourage writing histories of eleemosynary foundations, government agencies, political organizations, private political advocacy groups, and a whole range of journalistic practices and news-reporting strategies” (148). We suggest that businesses should be added to Weintraub’s list. This is not to suggest that historians have not examined the business-economics nexus because they certainly have, primarily in two ways.