Dissertation Research: Explaining Changes in Academic Economic Theory in the U.S., 1970-1990

本论文运用专业社会学和科学社会学的理论、方法和研究成果，对美国20世纪70年代和80年代的学术经济学进行了研究。在这个时候，经济学越来越关注复杂的数学技术和自由市场模型。这是尽管抗议-往往来自高级数理经济学家自己-学术工作变得越来越不切实际。该研究声称，这种状况可以通过考虑学院派经济学家和追求更多应用领域职业生涯的经济学家之间不断变化的关系来理解。 学者们追求越来越抽象的理论，因为他们认为自己是科学精英，为其他领域正在进行的所有有效工作提供正确的知识。然而，具有讽刺意味的是，他们能够做到这一点，只是因为更多的应用领域实际上越来越脱离学术界，越来越依赖自己的想法和做事方式。 支持这一解释的证据将在不同领域经济学家就业模式的变化中寻找，并在经济学家自己的陈述中寻找-学术和应用-关于他们做什么以及他们认为学术理论的作用。 调查的数据有四种类型：现有的就业模式统计数据;美国经济学会手册中的职业描述，包括传记和列表;学术经济学家态度的书面证据;以及在芝加哥和华盛顿对经济学家的原始采访，集中在非学术职业领域。

This dissertation research uses theory, methods and findings from sociology of professions and science studies to examine academic economics in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. At this time economics was focusing more and more on complex mathematical techniques and on models of free markets. This was despite protests - often coming from high-ranking mathematical economists themselves - that academic work was becoming increasingly unrealistic. The research claims that this state of affairs can be understood by considering the changing relationship between academic economists and economists pursuing careers in more applied fields. Academics pursued more and more abstract theories because they saw themselves as a scientific elite providing the correct knowledge behind all effective work going on in the other fields. Ironically however, they were able to do this only because the more applied fields in fact were becoming increasingly separated from academia and were relying more and more on their own ideas and ways of doing things. Evidence supporting this interpretation will be looked for in the changing patterns of employment of economists across the different fields, and in the statements of economists themselves - both academic and applied - concerning what they do and what they see as being the role of academic theories. Data for the investigations is of four types: existing statistics on patterns of employment; accounts of careers including biographies and listings in handbooks of the American Economic Association; written evidence of the attitudes of academic economists; and original interviews of economists in Chicago and Washington, DC, concentrating on those in non-academic career fields.