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Best economics paper of 1958
Leonardo Monasterio asks:
Which paper/book should we celebrate its 50th year? Obviously, my vote goes to the paper that started the cliometric revolution:
The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South
Alfred H. Conrad, John R. Meyer
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1958), pp. 95-130
Is there any other contestant?
The two obvious competitors are Modigliani and Miller on financial irrelevance (AER) and Paul Samuelson on the overlapping generations model (JPE). I'm inclined to put M-M first and Conrad and Meyer second. Am I missing anything? Don't one or two of Schelling's famous game theory articles date from this year as well?
Postwar American economics was splendid. WWII meant that many thinkers (Friedman, Samuelson, Schelling, others) had real world experience with tackling big problems. At the same time these people were just getting their hands on quantitative thinking and some more technical tools, yet the profession still valued breadth to some degree.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 17, 2008 at 01:22 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Phillips, Alban, "The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957", 1958, Economica
1958 was a busy year.
Posted by: Michael Kelly at Jun 17, 2008 2:20:59 PM
Tyler Cowen asked concerning 1958, "Don't one or two of Schelling's famous game theory articles date from this year as well?" Like Professor Cowen, I'm a former graduate student of Tom Schelling's and still an apostle. I looked it up, and Cowen is spot-on about Schelling's output in 1958.
In that year, according to the RAND Corporation catalog of his work -- see http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/schelling/ -- Schelling published not less than four works that undergird the core of The Strategy of Conflict (1960): "For the Abandonment of Symmetry in the Theory of Cooperative Games," "Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory," "Re-Interpretation of the Solution Concept for 'Non-Cooperative' Games," and "The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack." Each of these papers is available from that RAND link as a free PDF download.
I submit two other 1958 classics in game theory, each (like Schelling) holding up very well at half a century:
Herbert A. Simon, "Theories of Decision-Making in Economics and Behavioral Science," American Economic Review, 44:272 (1958).
Morton Deutsch, "Trust and Suspicion," The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2:265-279 (December 1958).
Notwithstanding my game theory roots, I will stand firm in the assertion that no essay of 1958 is of more enduring importance and consequence than Modigliani and Miller.
Posted by: Michael N. Pocalyko at Jun 17, 2008 9:37:23 PM
Tyler
Interested in your views on where we should rank the Phillips article. There is some debate around this in NZ - Phillips's birthplace - at present, with a big conference due to occur next month to mark the 50th anniversary of the famous Economica paper. Some argue that Phillips stumbled on an empirical regularity and did nothing more - even if that paper in some sense triggered a huge literature, taking as its starting point the regularity Phillips had spotted. Others note that the paper is one of the most widely-cited ever and that if the term (Phillips curve) hasn't entered popular language, it has probably came closer than most terms/ideas of recent decades.
Posted by: Michael Reddell at Jun 17, 2008 10:37:05 PM
I would also add as an Honorable Mention Coase's FCC paper published in the very first volume of the Journal of Law and Economics in 1958
Posted by: Enrique at Jun 17, 2008 11:32:07 PM
Jacob Mincer, "Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution," JPE. The birth of modern empirical labor economics?
Posted by: Bill at Jun 18, 2008 12:14:40 AM
The best economics paper from 1958 was my birth certificate. :-)
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Jun 18, 2008 2:25:28 AM
Tyler, Be true to your own School. Buchanan, Public Principles of Public Debt, 1958.
Posted by: bob tollison at Jun 18, 2008 6:32:05 AM
Tyler and readers,
Thanks for the answers! I had forgotten several serious contenders (but I stick with Conrad and Meyer's paper).
Posted by: Leonardo Monasterio at Jun 18, 2008 11:21:11 AM
The Theory of Committees and Elections by Duncan B lack is also from 1958 (but probably wouldn't top the list)
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