Nearly 85 years ago, Wesley Clair Mitchell, the acknowledged leader of American economists during the first half of this century, wrote: "Important as the art of spending is, we have developed less skill in its practice than in the practice of making money. Common sense forbids our wasting dollars earned by irksome efforts; and yet we are notoriously extravagant. Ignorance of qualities, uncertainty of taste, lack of accounting, carelessness about pricesà. Many of us scarcely know what becomes of our moneyà."More than ever, in our world of ever-increasing credit card debt, lenient bankruptcy laws, and runaway consumption, these words still ring true. This collection of Mitchell's essays, makes it easier for today's and tomorrow's economists and social scientists to become acquainted with Mitchell's many contributions to the study of the American economy.Regrettably, the passage of time can blur and even obliterate the reputation and achievements of yesterday's leaders of ideas and actions. Although the National Bureau of Economic Research, which Mitchell helped to found and which he led in the 1920s and 1930s, remains a leading research institution, relatively few of its associates, who represent the elite among U.S. academic economists, have any first-hand acquaintance with Mitchell's work. Eli Ginzberg rounds out this edition with Mitchell's comprehensive analysis of "Business Cycles," first published in 1929, an area that commanded most of his scholarly efforts. Ginzberg's essay on Mitchell, written in 1931 and published for the first time in 1997, serves as an appropriate introduction to this new edition. His afterword contains remarks delivered at the 50th anniversary of Mitchell's death at the meeting of the Allied Social Sciences Association held in Chicago early in 1998, a telling tribute to this undisputed giant in the field.Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874û1948) held major teaching posts at the University of California and Columbia University. One of the most eminent U.S. economists, Mitchell focused much of his research on the statistical investigation of business cycles. His two major works are Business Cycles (1913) and Business Cycles: The Problem at its Setting, (1927).Eli Ginzberg is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, and Director of the Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources at Columbia University.

This book examines and compares the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, with the 'new' institutionalism developed from neoclassical and Austrian sources.

Includes refereed articles on topics in economic methodology and the history of economics, including Austrian economic methodology and Wesley Mitchell. This collection covers such topics as Adam Smith, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Schumpeter, Janos Kornai, the Chicago School, French econometrics, and financial economics.

Institutional economics is recognised as a peculiarly American development in economics — nothing quite like it emerged in Britain or continental Europe. As such, a knowledge of the literature of institutionalism is a necessary part of understanding the history of American economics and American social thought more broadly. The work of the authors featured in this collection served to create and define the American institutionalist tradition in economics: Thorstein Veblen, Richard Theodore Ely, John Rogers Commons, Robert Franklin Hoxie, Wesley Clair Mitchell and Walton Hale Hamilton. These figures were also central to institutionalism’s numerous debates on the unifying characteristics of the movement and its principal contributions — making this collection of their most important works a convenient vehicle to assess these issues. It is also of increasing value given the fact that the main concerns of institutionalists, such as the role of institutions and development of an evolutionary approach, having been coming back into prominence as important issues in economics.

Social Science Quotations has been prepared to meet an evident, unmet need in the literature of the social sciences. Writings on the lives and theories of individual social scientists abound, but there has been no fully documented collection of memorable quotations from the social sciences as a whole. The frequent use of quotations in scientific as well as literary writings that are mere summaries or paraphrases typically fail to capture the full force of formulations that have made quotations memorable. This book of quotations invites the further reading or rereading of the original texts, beyond the quotations themselves. Sills and Merton draw extensively upon the writings that constitute the historical core of the social sciences and social thought; those works with staying power often described as the "classical texts." Many quotations have been drawn from these classical texts because the quotations contain memorable ideas memorably expressed. Both consequential and memorable, these words have been quoted over the generations, entering into the collective memory of social scientists everywhere and at times diffusing into popular thought and into the vernacular as well. This book is useful to social scientists, anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians, and for all who want to learn or verify memorable formulations and phrases concerning social thought and social theories. It is particularly useful for graduate students taking courses that examine the history of their discipline.

In this interdisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs--bridges, radio broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical power--inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language and logic of engineering in the early twentieth century, bringing terms like efficiency, technocracy, and social engineering into the political lexicon. Demonstrating that the cultural impact of technology spread far beyond the factory and laboratory, Jordan shows how a panoply of reformers embraced the language of machinery and engineering as metaphors for modern statecraft and social progress. President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, became the most powerful of the technocratic progressives. Elsewhere, this vision of social engineering was debated by academics, philanthropists, and commentators of the day--including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Walter Lippmann, and Charles Beard. The result, Jordan argues, was a new way of talking about the state. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.