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

消费者的进步：应用福利经济学的历史（学者奖）

• 批准号: 0750610
• 负责人: Spencer Banzhaf
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-05-01 至 2009-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0750610&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Consumers; Progress; History; Applied; Welfare

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.

在整个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”一直持非常矛盾的态度。与描述经济活动和预测经济如何对某些刺激做出反应的任务相比，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，政府政策在多大程度上可能使他们变得更好或更糟，以及一个群体如何？的收益应该与另一组进行权衡？的损失。这方面的例子包括国内生产总值的计量、生活费用（通货膨胀）的计量和成本/效益分析。在整个世纪，经济学家们普遍变得更加接受这种活动，这对该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对各种统计测量做出贡献的共同来源，历史学家关于社会科学、政策和现代国家之间的联系的工作没有建立这些联系。另一方面，学院派经济学家的工作倾向于强调精英机构中有影响力人物的理论贡献，而忽视了更温和的经济学家（例如政府机构中的经济学家）“在战壕中”所做的工作。本研究将这些方法结合起来，将应用研究人员做出的详细决策与学术经济学的更广泛潮流以及他们运作的政治气候联系起来。这样的研究将从三个重要方面帮助我们理解世界。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拉向和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突出的政策问题提供信息。例如，在世纪官僚、经济学家和统计学家发展衡量经济福利的机构时所吸取的教训，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着出版，面向历史学家、经济学家和政策制定者。