CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORY OF HETERODOX ECONOMICS IN THE 20^TH CENTURY

At the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology

Thursday – Saturday, 3 – 5 October 2002

CONFERENCE PAPERS ABSTRACTS

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Heterodox Economics at the University of Manitoba

Fletcher Baragar and John Loxley

In terms of the entrenchment and hegemonic influence of neoclassical economics, economics departments in Canadian universities are virtually indistinguishable from their mainstream counterparts in the United States. A notable exception exists at the University of Manitoba, where heterodox economics figures prominently in both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, as well as in the active research programs of the faculty. The paper traces the emergence and character of this heterodoxy. Particular attention is given to the significance of the impact of the old Canadian Political Economy, with its blend of institutionalism and economic history, as it shaped an indigenous but influential generation of social scientists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The emergence of the both the new left in the 1960s, and a heightened interest in development and dependency left its mark as the department expanded in the 1970s. The unfailing commitment to pluralism and diversity shown by Clare Pentland, and, above all, by Clarence Barber as Department Head, ensured that there were sufficient opportunities for bearers of these larger intellectual currents to forge and sustain a meaningful heterodox alternative. Recent developments, including the political decline of the left in the 1980s and 1990s, the increased squeeze on public funding for universities and the concomitant push for external, private funding, and the consolidation of the neoclassical paradigm in the wake of challenges in the 1970s, have all served to undermine Manitoba’s heterodox foundation, leaving its future prospects somewhat uncertain.

The paper reviews European debates on Marx's value theory, from 1960 through the 1980s, with a special stress on the debate in Germany (Schmidt, Backhaus, Reichelt), France (Benetti, Cartelier, Aglietta), England (Dobb, Steedman, Fine-Harris, Himmelweit-Mohun) and Italy (Colletti, Napoleoni,

Vianello, Garegnani). It traces a shift in these debates which, having centered on the issue of the determination of prices of production, moved on to problematise the link between money and value and the notion of exploitation. A possible contradiction is identified between Marx's commodity theory of money in vol I and a sound theory of money as finance towards which there are hints in vol III. We explore the uneasy relationship between this problematic and the theory of value as a theory of exploitation. The way out of the apparent contradiction in Marx's theory is to reframe it, synthesising Rubin's approach to the labour theory of value and the circuit theory of money as a macromonetary foundation of exploitation. The last section takes Italy and France as a case study showing how value debates were embedded in a peculiar view of economic policy and of the crisis in capitalist

accumulation, at that time.

The paper deals with the Institutionalist "Perspective" of the University of Oklahoma (OU), Norman, Oklahoma. The first part deals with pre-history such as the arrival in Norman of Nelson Peach from the University of Texas-Austin and his part in forming the Institutionalist perspective at OU which has lasted up until the present with such persons as Alex Kondonassis. The second part discusses the text of Nelson Peach used at OU for many years; and includes major topics of Institutionalist perspectives selected by the present author including a comment on resources based upon the previous works of Zimmerman. The text, Principles of Economics, provided a basic Keynesian framework, but with an historical/institutionalist perspective that was an important part of the OU economics experience. The third part deals with excerpts of works and comments from the graduate students of the Department of Economics, OU, gleaned from a survey mailed to all of them in the mid-1990s. Selected responses are quoted from the respondents who represented nearly 20% of the over 100 mailings, including such persons as William Breit, Roger Troub, and others. The last part deals with concluding comments, including a perspective on the experience at OU and of the importance of the OU perspective.

This is a presentation on the current proposal and historical antecedents of the computerized job markets described by the late James Cooke Brown in *The Job Market of the Future: Using Computers to Humanize Economies* (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). First proposed by Edward Bellamy in the novel Looking

Backward (1888), this system of employment completes the transformation from labor markets, in which labor is the commodity, to job markets, in which workers occupy in the newly-comfortable role of choosing their work.

Bellamy's projected world of 2000 contained nationalized economies with job stocks adjusted to provide full employment through shorter hours in unpopular jobs. Bellamy's books generated a fierce U.S. debate on the merits of capitalism, a national movement composed of Bellamy Clubs, and

contributed to the program and reach of the Populist Party at the beginning of the last century.

Brown's computerized job market proposal brings an inventor's approach to the arguments over profit and incentive, public vs. private production, full employment, currency speculation, and inequality in international trade. Like Bellamy's novelistic treatments of economic questions, the

inventor's approach identifies economic functions and then suggests how these functions might be better accomplished.

Some argue that novelistic (Bellamy) and inventive (Brown) treatments of economic systems are not part of the history of economics. This presentation argues that heterodox economic theories must take root and grow in a popular context, since they are not promoted by elites.

Marxism: From Class Struggle to Political Economy

Clark Everling

In this paper, I trace the path of Marxism in the 20^th century with special focus upon its place within political economy. I argue that the emphasis upon Marxism as a political economy has been directly connected to movement away from Marxism as a theory of class struggle. I begin by establishing how and why, in Marx’s view, all history is a history of class struggle and integrate this perspective with his work in Capital. I argue that political economy was one of the things that Marx was critiquing and that he was attempting to show that political economy is a product of capitalism rather than seeking to establish a Marxist political economy.

The conversion of Marxism into a political economy commenced at the beginning of the 20^th century when economists so interpreted and critiqued it and Marxists responded to these criticisms from those same perspectives. Initially these responses concerned primarily the accuracy of Marx’s calculations and the validity of his various theories, such as the falling tendency of the rate of profit. But I argue that developments in the 1930s and after, as well as the evolution of Social Democracy, Stalinism, and Keynesianism, led to an increasing conflation of Marxism with Keynesianism. This conflation was deepened and interpreted as self-evident in the capitalist economies after 1945. Continued emphasis within the work of Marxist political economists upon exchange and consumption, rather than productive relations, brought this conversion to its present development. I argue in conclusion that this confusion only further complicates the difficulty of Marxists, as well as non-Marxist economists, in explaining the present global capitalism.

This paper will chronicle the development of alternative approaches to economic education in the United States. Particular emphasis will be placed on the connection between a pluralistic heterodox approach to economics, a transformative understanding of "liberal education," and critical thinking. The authors will demonstrate why direct engagement with competing theories of income distribution provide an immediate entrée into this discussion. We show that taking the debate over the distribution of income as the "point of entry" permits the introduction of considerations of gender, race, and social justice in ways which reinforce the development of student’s critical thinking skills.

The paper examines the history of heterodox political economy at the New School for Social Research. The New School was a locus for heterodox thought from its inception, with such faculty as Thorstein Veblen and W. E. B. Du Bois. With the creation of the "University in Exile" the New School brought economists from Europe who were critical of mainstream economics and distinguished carefully between Classical Political Economy and Marx, on the one hand, and modern neoclassical economics on the other. Some of the faculty, including Adolph Lowe and Edward Heimann, were also pioneers in interdisciplinary political economy and the history of heterodox thought. Others, such as Abba Lerner, Gerhard Colm, Hans Neisser, and Lowe again, were active proponents of what might be considered heterodox economic policies. With the hiring of Robert Heilbroner, Edward Nell, and Stephen Hymer in the early-mid sixties, the New School, made a commitment to continuing their heterodox and Marxian traditions and interest in interdisciplinary political economy, heterodox policy, and the history of heterodox economic thought. Following Hymer's death, the Graduate Faculty confirmed its commitment to Marxian Economics with the hiring of Anwar Shaikh and David Gordon. Thomas Vietorisz, also hired in the early sixties, was an additional contributor to Marxian economics, economic planning, and socialist economics. The Cambridge tradition was also explicitly incorporated into the program, with Nell and Shaikh active participants in the Capital Theory debates, and the hiring of John Eatwell and Pierangelo Garegnani, as well as numerous visitors, including Luigi Pasinetti. The political economy of gender and race were also made an important part of the curriculum, with important feminist and black political economists such as Heidi Hartmann, Nancy Folbre, Gunseli Berik, Rhonda Williams, and others. Heterodox development economics (often of the structuralist variety) was also part of the curriculum and research output of the faculty, including Ednaldo da Silva, Alice Amsden, and Lance Taylor. The New School has also produced a great many Ph.D. students who have become active contributors to heterodox political economics, many of whom have become editors of heterodox journals, presidents of heterodox organizations, and contributors to heterodox research. The New School has also hosted numerous conferences over the years that highlight heterodox approaches to economics and has additionally hosted many visiting scholars and professors in heterodox economics.

Hyman Minsky has been one of the leading heterodox economist of the past century. Other than being influential on the Post Keynesian thought, he affected the mainstream economics through the New Keynesian approach. In this paper, after briefly presenting his biographical itinerary, we look for his intellectual roots. According to us, Minsky's approach can be rooted in the Cambridge monetarytradition as his handwritten notes on copies of the Marshallian "Principles", and Keynes's "Treatise" and "General Theory" demonstrates. He was also deeply affected by Schumpeter's "business cycle" theory which he emended by introducing Fisher's "debt deflation approach": In his Ph.D. thesis, we find a first model of the "Financial Instability Hypothesis".

The FIH has been very successful among the PK economists. We review and

compare 3 models of it (Taylor and O'Connel, Franke and Semmler, and Delli Gatti and Gallegati) which model the FIH as a systemic property of the capitalist economy. Rather than being isolated to the heterodox sector of the discipline, the FIH enjoyed a remarkable, but often neglected, success in the mainstream economy. In particular, the emphasis on financial fragility shifted from a systemic element of the system to the amplification-propagation mechanism in the Slutsky-Frish tradition: Bernanke and Gertler, Greenwald and Stiglitz, and Kiyotaki and Moore.

Finally, we review some "evolutionary" approaches of the FIH with heterogeneous and interacting agents. The final section compares and evaluate the three different approaches.

Heterodox economics has long been burdened with the mandate of providing a complete alternative to neoclassical economics, the latter understood as a unified and homogeneous system of thought. This view was commonplace among left-wing economists (many of them Marxists) in the 1970s and early 80s. Not coincidentally, it bears a striking resemblance to orthodox Marxian conceptions of capitalism and socialism/communism, the former understood as an all-powerful, all-embracing system and the latter as its complete and total – and superior – replacement. Radical economists appear to have projected these conceptions onto economic theory, envisioning neoclassicism as a unified, dominant system and themselves as the chief engineers (or prognosticators) of its ultimate demise via their own superior economic science. Philosophically, this latter view gained considerable stature from the writings of Thomas Kuhn (1970). Kuhn never wrote about economics per se. Yet his concepts of paradigm, normal science, and scientific revolution gave hope and legitimacy to Marxists and other anti-neoclassical economists insofar as it allowed them to see mainstream economics (circa 1975) as a dominant paradigm in crisis, ripe for overthrow by an emerging revolutionary science.

This paper will examine the effects of vision on the goals and history of heterodox economists since the 1970s, and the degree to which the recent ascendance of the term heterodox (in preference to radical) marks a shift towards a different and arguably more constructive sense of pluralism. The old approach continues to inspire intellectual energy and solidarity among anti-neoclassical economists. Still, I believe that this "paradigm warfare" approach also weakens heterodox economics by encouraging us to see neoclassicism and ourselves in unduly monolithic terms. In addition, since the ultimate aim of this approach is to remove neoclassical thinking from the field, it also weakens our commitments to pluralism by making them subservient to a higher, anti-pluralistic objective.

As a positive contribution, this paper will outline a different view of the heterodox project in economics in which the ultimate aim would be not paradigm dominance but intellectually progressive conversation, a pluralism that would value difference and dialogue within each school of thought, and within each of us. On this view, our aspiration as a community of heterodox scholars would no longer be Kuhn’s homogeneous and unified "scientific community" but something more like Yngve Ramstad’s description of institutionalist economics as "a catholic movement comprised of multifarious groups with some fundamental disagreements" (1995, 1004). Recent developments in economic discourse suggest that this kind of pluralism is already taking root. Over the past two decades, challenges to the philosophical norms of our discipline have arisen from many quarters: from Marxists, feminists, Austrians, Keynesians, institutionalists, and others. At the same time, monolithic images of neoclassicism are slowly giving way to more nuanced understandings (Colander, "The Death of Neoclassical Economics" 2000). To me this growing sense of pluralism is a sign of intellectual progress, an enhanced capacity to understand economic phenomena and ourselves. The radical/Kuhnian approach, with its ideal of a single oppositional paradigm, does not see this as progress; worse, in pursuit of its own sense of progress, it threatens to diminish or even to destroy the very heterodoxy that is our greatest intellectual asset.
 

Many of the great mid-century economists now claimed by heterodoxy - Keynes, Kalecki, Lerner, Lange, Means, Sweezy, Kaldor, Robinson, Sraffa, Kerr, Dunlop - were at the center of economic discourse in their day. An orthodox account that either diminishes their role, or trims it to fit a rational reconstruction of current orthodox theory, is lies, damned lies, and Whig history. We should not create a mirror image of these lies by trying to reclaim these authors for a parallel, and equally false, history of separate heterodoxy. Rather, we should attempt to understand two things: first, how and why their ideas came to be so heavily censored in orthodox training and practice; second, the evolution of our understanding of what parts of economic research and teaching are "orthodox", and what parts are heterodox.

To address these questions I will sketch three themes in the interface between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

a) The political economy of macroeconomic orthodoxy.

From Sound Finance to the Washington Consensus, the rhetoric of conservative macroeconomic policy must struggle against a much broader view of theory and practice. What we have come to regard as macroeconomic 'orthodoxy' is in fact a control mechanism employed by finance capital and its allies in the state. It is employed not because it represents a consensus of orthodox academic economic theory, but because financial markets, the IMF and so on cannot control the implementation of policies based on the more sophisticated economic theories of the day. While quite narrow, the orthodox theory taught in most of the hegemonic graduate programs and published in leading journals has always actually addressed a far wider range of institutional issues and policy options than this "consensus".

b) Microfoundations and political economy from Kalecki to Gintis.

The orthodox mantra of microfoundations has little to do with orthodox practice. The 'microfoundation' of new classical economics, for instance, is an assumption of the existence of Walrasian equilibrium. [Lucas's employment of this unobservable and unfalisifiable foundation is quite simply Hegelian.] On the other side of the aggregation problem, the new institutional economics of Williamson identifies transactions costs, and then waves its hands to produce some sort of evolutionary optimality. In neither case is there any real foundation, even by the standards of orthodox discourse. In terms of orthodoxy's own stated standards, the micro-macro constructions of heterodox economists from Lerner, Lange and Kalecki to Bowles, Gintis, Akerlof and Stiglitz are comparatively rigorous. We must consider a range of cultural, political and pedagogical explanations for the difficulty which orthodoxy has digesting the latter models.

c) Self-identified heterodoxy vs. the dispersed multitude of heterodox economists.

The methodological narrowness of leading economics graduate programs may make us feel like outsiders, but in fact a tremendous amount of heterodox economic teaching has come to be done in business schools, and in other academic departments from geography to political science to urban planning. I discuss as examples two papers published in the AER in recent years. Both are by business school economists, both use primary empirical research (asking people questions about real world situations), and both challenge central aspects of orthodoxy (with regard, in one case, to the theory of the firm, and in the other to labor markets). I ask whether the best strategy for heterodox economics might not be to find a new home, outside of economics departments.

In his A Life In Our Times, J. K. Galbraith remarks that he found the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at mid-Twentieth Century to be the most interesting major department of economics in the United States at that time. He makes the statement on the basis of its heterodoxy faculty within the proximity of a legislature of decidedly hostile composition. He insisted that the reason the legislature was not in a state of constant uproar was because of their obtuseness on economic doctrines.

This is at least partially true. But the legislature was more aware of the situation than Galbraith admits. This paper would take up the composition of the department, the heterodoxies that prevailed, the personalities involved and the general climate of opinion that prevailed on the campus of the University. The heterodoxy was not confined to the economic department. But the economic department was perhaps the major source of the heterodoxy prevailing on the campus.

It will be an intellectual portrait of that department at mid-century. At that time the major figures were C. E. Ayres, Ruth Allen, E. E. Hale, R. H. Montgomery, and Alton Wiley. Each in his/her own way was a maverick. E. T. Miller, then an emeritus professor still teaching, was the one non-orthodox member, but one who upheld the right of the others to dissent.

In this paper we introduce the work of Clifford Hugh Douglas, evaluating his contribution to mainstream and heterodox economics. Referring to our existing publications, we note the potential for development of his key concepts of the role of money and credit creation in the economy with particular reference to the scope for eradication of waged labour. We demonstrate that Douglas' distillation of the political and economic works of contemporary socialist and guild socialist writers was entirely consistent with the economics of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. Douglas social credit remained incomprehensible in terms of economic orthodoxy, since it rejects the necessity to maintain full employment as the basis of income distribution. Nevertheless, this socialist economics was widely studied through a host of journals and publications throughout the twentieth century, while providing the basis for the life work of James Meade and other orthodox economists. For reasons outlined in the paper, we note the virtual extinction of the study of social credit in higher education.

Henry George has been equally neglected, but with far more justification. His Progress and Poverty (1879) has been acclaimed as perhaps the greatest economics best-seller of all times (Blaug 2000:270). Although included in lists of heterodox economics which rarely mention Douglas social credit, (see call for papers for this conference), he was roundly dismissed by Marx, along with other "such hucksters of panaceas" and 'socialists' who allow "wage labor, i.e. the capitalist system of production to continue ..." (Marx 1892). The reasons for the neglect of Douglas are explored in the paper.

In 1938 Barbara Wootton published Lament For Economics, an indictment of the state of contemporary economic theory. She complained that economics was of no use to anyone, and unintelligible to all except a small minority of specialists. Economists were unable to agree; they ignored reality, and often served as apologists for capitalism. Thus economics was not a science, and could contribute little or nothing either to the understanding of capitalism or to the organisation of a future socialist society. Wootton’s criticism made no impact at the time, and she soon abandoned economics and became an eminent criminologist and social theorist. However, many of her arguments were repeated, 62 years later, in the French students’ manifesto that led to the formation of the Post Austistic Economics movement.

The history of the Post Keynesian school of economics is here discussed through the history of a label. The label’s meaning and the group that felt defined by it changed in ways that reflect the organisational and intellectual history of this group of dissenting economists. The significance of the label for the history of the school is two-fold. It served the purpose of presenting this group of economists to the profession, affirming their distinct form of analysis. This could be seen as a fundamental step in moving from a position of dissent to a positive research program that could be recognised by the economics community. And yet the content of the term remained disputed in an internal debate, which reveals distinct approaches under the umbrella of the term. In this the history of the label reveals a drawing of the acceptable limits and forms of enquiry. In the history of these external and internal dimensions in the label we can study the formation of the Post Keynesian school of economics in its search for distinctiveness and for internal consistency and definition.

The paper will attempt to illustrate that existing political/social issues influence journal submissions to the journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Professor Paul Davidson will retell in his own words the circumstances that surround the ongoing submissions that have been published in the journal over which he is the editor. Moreover, what were the circumstances surrounding the early publications? Who were Dr. Davidson's contemporaries and what role did they play in the journal? What has been the response over the years by the mainstream to his rather un-orthodox journal and where does he see the future of heterodox economics heading? Hopefully this paper will expose some of the noteworthy achievements of sometimes-neglected economic though and at the same time highlight some individual achievements of popular Heterodox economists.

In 1985, Martin Bronfenbrenner published an article in the American Economic Review assessing the impact of the institutionalist critics of mainstream economics (Bronfenbrenner 1985). Though the article was broadly sympathetic with the institutionalist tradition, it concluded that

institutionalism had been pushed "into minority status although not into complete obscurity" in the economics profession (Bronfenbrenner 1985, 20). This article prompted a response from David A. Martin and Anne Mayhew who submitted a reply to Bronfenbrenner (1985) but were rebuffed by the editor of the American Economic Review (AER) and the current and immediate past presidents of the American Economics Association (AEA) (Martin and Mayhew 1987). This response tended to confirm a perception among many, if not most, institutionalists in the Veblen-Commons-Ayres tradition that they have been systematically excluded from access to publishing in mainstream journals. Institutionalists have felt that there was, if not a conspiracy, at least a strong resistance in the mainstream journals to the publication of critical and institutionalist perspectives. The belief that institutionalists were systemically excluded from the AER and other mainsteam journals led, in part, to the formation of the Association for Evolutionary Economics in 1965, and the publication of an institutionalist journal, the Journal of Economic Issues (JEI) in 1967. My purpose in this paper is to provide a preliminary answer to the question: How can the secular decline of institutionalism in the mainstream journals be explained? In order to do this, I will first present evidence that demonstrates the decline of institutionalism and state

hypotheses about this decline. These hypotheses can be grouped into five categories: exclusion, academia, reputation, contribution, and discrimination. Though I will provide evidence relevant primarily for the first two hypotheses, I will comment on how the others could be evaluated in future

research. I conclude the paper with some observations on the current resurgence of institutional economics.

In the 1960s, Urban Economics using neoclassical theory and a rigorous, statistical methodology replaced the institutional approach to real estate economics (Urban Land Economics -ULE) associated with Richard Ely, Richard Ratcliff and James Grasskamp. Graduate real estate programs and academic journals became overwhelmingly oriented toward the Urban Economics research paradigm.

However, the ideals of the ULE tradition survive in the real estate appraisal profession. Professional real estate organizations had emerged in response to real estate financial problems arising in the era of the Great Depression. Also, the development of Federal lending programs and corporate real estate investment markets (debt and equity) had spread the use of real estate appraisal concepts and techniques.

Recent work on the intellectual and socio-economic character of the professions illustrates how this process nurtured ULE. A professional network- as a network of practitioners sharing a core competence – involved adherence to standards of practice arising as a strategic response to dynamic production problems. Standards of real estate appraisal practice (USPAP) developed in response to problem situations that required techniques of analysis and procedures of inquiry inconsistent with neoclassical economic theory and research. These standards and practices reflect aspects of uncertainty, asset specificity and opportunism inherent in valuing rights and interests of real estate transactions. Through a common program of education, training and trade journals that transmit a core competency ULE ideals and procedures have continued in this professional niche.

The inconsistency between UE theory and professional practice has caused a significant disconnect between the work of academic real estate and the efforts of professional appraisers. Academic work has been widely perceived as "irrelevant" and, conversely, "appraisal theory" has been only vaguely related to accepted theory. Recent attempts to bridge this gap must face real theoretical and methodological issues.

There is an implicit belief, held by many Anglo-Saxon economic historians that their work is complementary, if not essential to that of economists. This story of ‘complementarity’ is an attractive one, though inaccurate, both from a historical and a present-day perspective. Economic history was created as a separate discipline in the late 19^th century, and has remained separate since.

One obvious explanation for this separation is that economic history is not reducible to economics. While this is true, it is not the most important reason why economic history was created and remains ‘separate’. Indeed this explanation fails to account for the recurrent declarations by representative members of the economic history community that their discipline is a rival to economic study. Declarations like that of Paul David (1993) who asserts that the work of economic historians is not ‘complementary’ to economics, but is economics (or more precisely what economics should be).

It is no coincidence that a claim for the historical study of economics, in opposition to a–historical one, runs from Ashley (1893) -the first chair of economic history in the Anglo-Saxon world- to David (1994). While all economic historians may not be historical economists, the opposition to orthodoxy represented by the latter may well account for the dynamism, changes and evolution of economic history. More generally, the history of economic history cannot be studied without careful attention to historical economists and their relationship with mainstream economics. More specifically and much more interesting, the history of economic history should be written as that of a heterodox economic school.
 

Walton Hamilton was one of the major promoters of American institutionalism in the interwar period. Apart from his own writingBhe introduced the term institutional economics into the literature in a 1918 conference paperBHamilton was closely associated with the creation of educational programs with a decidedly institutionalist orientation. At Amherst College from 1916 to 1923 and at the Robert Brooking Graduate School between 1923 and 1928, Hamilton and his colleagues engaged in interesting experiments in economics education, and produced a quite remarkable stream of graduates. This paper will outline the programs developed by Hamilton, and the subsequent careers of many of the graduates, in both academics (in economics, political science, and law) and in government service. Many of Hamilton=s students occupied key positions in the New Deal and, later, in international organizations such as the ILO and United Nations. In 1928 the Institute for Government Research and the Institute of Economics were merged into what became the Brookings Institution, and the Robert Brookings Graduate School was abandoned as a separate entity. The reasons for this seem to have included funding difficulties, internal politics, and Robert Brooking=s concerns over the direction the School had taken. The closing of the School was an event that caused much anguish and public dispute. Hamilton left to join Yale Law School, and an important centre for institutional economics was lost.

The paper will draw on archive material including the Walton Hamilton Papers, the Archives of the Brookings Institution, and an archive of taped interviews with former graduates of Brookings. These were conducted in the early 1970s by Robert Coleberd as part of a project on the Brookings Graduate School. He never completed this project, and deposited the tapes in the Brookings Institution Archive. As far as I am aware this material has not been accessed before.

A distinguished group of institutional economists have called Michigan State University their home. Their interaction enriched their teaching and research. They provided a range of courses unmatched at any other university. Courses were taught in the Department of Economics, the Law

School and the Department of Agricultural Economics including institutional and behavioral economics, history of thought, law and economics, theory of the state, international development, labor, agricultural policy, science policy, environmental policy, and public utilities. The group included one of the founders of AFEE (Trebing) and the long term editor of the Journal of Economic Issues (Samuels). Other institutionalists at MSU were Robert Solo, James Shaffer, Steve Woodbury, Paul Strassmann, Nicholas Mercuro, Walter Adams, and Allan Schmid.

Economics is unique among the social science disciplines in failing to organize a separate feminist caucus or association in the 1970s. IAFFE provided the first organized feminist voice in the profession in 1990. Thus, twenty years of feminist research, networking and perspectives on policy--now integral traditions in other social science disciplines--were lost in economics. Groundwork for the formation IAFFE was laid in the fall of 1990, when began to weave together a network of feminist economists interested in knowing of other feminist economists and of feminist work being undertaken in economics. "Founding members" were invited to add their voices to the emerging organization. In November, 1991,the e-mail network femecon-l went on-line and gave feminist economists in all parts of the world instant communication. This dramatically increased the dialogue and focus on organization building and encouraged discussion of feminist research and resources.

The first organizational meeting of the soon to be IAFFE, was held at the December, 1991, Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) meetings in New Orleans. Since its formation in 1992, IAFFE has served as a catalyst for advances in feminist economics. It has played an essential role in making possible feminist research, as well as network and coalition building. IAFFE played a pivotal role in establishing Feminist Economics, encouraging the vision, enabling the planning, and facilitating the contract negotiations for publication of the journal. Prior to the publication of Feminist Economics, there was no outlet for research in feminist economics.

The events of the seventies favoured, among those in charge of economic development policies, the predominance of the classic efficient market theory. In search of the "third way", middle ground between planning and laissez faire, Keynesian vision is coming back. The theoretical constructions of the last few decades and the new economic realities demand re-appraising the heterodox economics ideas, pillars of economic development thought. They also demand admitting their validity concerns and the importance of developing economic knowledge with audacity, heresy and rigor.

This paper presents a simplified approach to the lines of thought that have influenced Latin American economic development affairs: ECLAC’s structuralism view, IMF monetarism, the dependency approach, and the stabilizing and structural adjustment view. The fundamentals of Latin American Heterodox are dealt with in this paper as a means of re-appraising current underdevelopment problems. The work deduces a fundamental methodological implication: that the dynamics of a given economy and the transformation of its components require a deliberate conduction, i.e. the conscious action of the State. The objective is to realize an analytical review of the Latin American heterodox thought, particularly ECLAC’s contributions towards regional development. Our guiding line is the transformation of the economic international environment and of the processes and current paradigms. For that purpose this contribution makes a temporary classification to which it adds ECLAC’s economic policy proposals consistent with its central thesis, such as industrialization and regional integration as a means of development, productive transformation with social equality, sustainable growth and the "fiscal pact".
 

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