Essay C - Economics

Summary

Where earlier generations of economic thinkers had tended to be bureaucrats (Mill), financiers (Ricardo), and publishers (Carey), late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American economists were increasingly likely to be university-based scholars. In 1879, Harvard inaugurated the United States’ first economics department. In 1885, the American Economics Association came into being. Academic journals multiplied around this time: the Quarterly Journal of Economics appeared in 1886, the Journal of Political Economy in 1892, and the American Economic Review in 1911. Gradually, the term “economics” supplanted the older term “political economy.”¹