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

在整个20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”一直深感矛盾。与描述经济活动和预测经济对某些刺激措施的反应不同，福利经济学需要更明确的价值判断，包括个人或群体的生活状况，政府政策对他们的改善或恶化程度，以及一个群体的生活状况如何？美国的收益应该与另一组进行权衡？年代的损失。例子包括GDP的测量、生活成本（通货膨胀）的测量和成本/收益分析。在20世纪的过程中，经济学家普遍越来越接受这种活动，这对这门学科和美国公共政策的形成产生了深远的影响。本研究探讨了这一转变的历史，重点关注政府机构和其他机构的熟练工经济学家的实践，以及精英研究型大学经济学家的理论发展。虽然福利经济学的理论和实践一直是经济学家为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并没有把这些联系起来。另一方面，学院派经济学家的工作往往强调精英机构中有影响力人物的理论贡献，而忽略了更谦虚的经济学家（例如在政府机构中）“在战壕中”所做的工作。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的更广泛潮流以及其运作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，它将帮助我们理解美国经济和社会政策现代史的一个重要部分。其次，它将帮助我们理解经济学专业的社会学，探索经济学家如何应对和解决将他们推向政策分析或远离政策分析的紧张关系。第三，也是最后一点，这段历史有可能为当今重要的政策问题提供启示。例如，20世纪官僚、经济学家和统计学家建立衡量经济福利的机构时所吸取的经验教训，可能直接适用于今天那些寻求生态健康指标的统计机构的类似斗争。该项目的研究成果将作为专著出版，面向历史学家、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.