Consumers' Progress: The History of Applied Welfare Economics (Scholar's Award)

在整个二十世纪的大部分时间里，美国经济学家作为一个群体，对所谓的“福利经济学”一直深表矛盾。与描述经济活动和预测经济可能对某些刺激措施做出反应的任务不同，福利经济学需要更明确的价值判断，即个人或群体的表现如何，政府政策可能在多大程度上改善或恶化他们的生活，以及一个群体如何？S的收获应该与另一个群体的收益进行比较吗？S的损失。例如，国内生产总值的衡量、生活成本(通货膨胀)的衡量以及成本/效益分析。在20世纪的过程中，经济学家普遍变得更容易接受这样的活动，对这一学科和美国公共政策的形成产生了深远的影响。这项研究探索了这一转变的历史，重点是政府机构和其他机构的临时经济学家的实践，以及精英研究型大学的经济学家的理论发展。尽管福利经济学的理论和实践一直是经济学家对各种统计测量做出贡献的共同来源，但历史学家在社会科学、政策和现代国家之间的联系方面的工作没有建立这些联系。另一方面，学院派经济学家的研究倾向于强调精英机构有影响力的人物的理论贡献，而忽视了较为谦虚的经济学家所做的“战壕中”的工作，例如在政府机构。这项工作结合了这些方法，将应用研究人员做出的详细决定与学术经济学中更广泛的潮流以及运行的政治气候联系起来。这样的研究将在三个重要方面有助于我们对世界的理解。首先，它将帮助我们了解美国现代经济和社会政策历史的一个重要部分。其次，它将帮助我们理解经济学专业的社会学，探索经济学家如何努力应对和解决将他们拉向政策分析和远离政策分析的紧张局势。第三，也是最后一点，这段历史有可能为当今的重大政策问题提供信息。例如，20世纪当官僚、经济学家和统计学家开发机构来衡量经济福利时所学到的教训，可能直接适用于那些今天寻求生态健康指标的统计机构的类似挣扎。这个项目的研究将以专著的形式出版，目标读者是历史学家、经济学家和政策制定者。

Throughout most of the twentieth century, American economists as a group have been deeply ambivalent about so-called "welfare economics." In contrast to the tasks of describing economic activity and predicting how the economy might respond to some stimulus, welfare economics requires more explicit value judgments about how individuals or groups are faring, about the extent to which they may be made better or worse off by government policies, and about how one group?s gains should be weighed against another group?s losses. Examples include measurement of GDP, measurement of the cost of living (inflation), and cost/benefit analysis. Over the course of the 20th century, economists generally became more accepting of such activities, with profound implications for the discipline and for the shaping of American public policy. This research explores the history of that transformation, focusing on the practice of journeymen economists in government agencies and other institutions, as well as the theoretical developments by economists at elite research universities.Although the theory and practice of welfare economics has been a common source from which economists have drawn their contributions to a variety of statistical measurements, work by historians on the connections between social science, policy, and the modern state have not made these connections. Work by academic economists, on the other hand, has tended to emphasize the theoretical contributions of influential figures at elite institutions, neglecting the work done "in the trenches" by more modest economists, in government agencies for example. This work combines these approaches by connecting the detailed decisions made by applied researchers to the broader currents in academic economics as well as the political climate in which the operated.Such a study will contribute to our understanding of the world in three important ways. First, it will help us to understand an important part of the modern history of economic and social policy in the United States. Second, it will help us to understand the sociology of the economics profession, exploring the ways economists have wrestled with and resolved the tensions pulling them toward and away from policy analysis. Third and finally, this history has the potential to inform prominent policy issues of today. For example, the lessons learned in the 20th century as bureaucrats, economists, and statisticians developed institutions to measure economic welfare may be directly applicable to similar struggles of those statistical agencies who today seek indicators of ecological health. Research from this project will be published as a monograph aimed at historians, economists, and policy makers.