That's by Marion Fourcade and the subtitle is Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain & France, 1890s to 1990s.
I very much liked this book and I might call it one of my favorite history of economic thought books, period. It skips textual exegesis and looks at what the economics profession actually did — in the comparative sense — in the United States, England, and France.
On France, I liked the data on p.6. Circa 1981, only 52 percent of French economists thought that rent control reduced the quantity and quality of the housing stock. Only 49 percent of French economists thought that flexible exchange rates were "effective," compared to 94 percent in the United States and 92 percent in West Germany. Remember Alex's blog posts on this topic, here and here?
The extent of hierarchy in the profession in England shocked even me:
Joan Robinson, for instance, did not become a professor until the ripe age of sixty-two. And such a well-respected economist as Roy Harrod never rose higher than a readership at Nuffield College.
Definitely recommended. Here is the book's home page.
Re: Joan Robinson – is that professor as in American Professor or professor as in British Professor? The two are very different.
@Goeff NoNick: General Equilibrium Theory. Remember Walras was French.
It is worth bearing in mind that in the UK, at least until recently, the position of Reader was the most prestigious and sought after. Professorships came with administrative duties. Readers did not have to teach — only research.
My understanding is that British universities only had one “professor” per discipline. Everyone else had a lesser title such as “reader” or “fellow.” It’s worth remembering that Keynes also never held a professorship.
Does this say anything interesting about economics vis-a-vis other sciences?
If you did a similar poll among biologists or physicists, I doubt you’d see significant nation-to-nation differences.
(Or would you?)
I think that the French opinion on rent control is due to the following two facts:
_In housing, there is only second generation type rent control. Maximal raise in the rents are decided with respect to CPI. Besides, every nine years and every change of tenant, the cap on a rent is lifted. So this kind of rent control has much weaker effects than New York’s one
_The landlord’s terror in France is not rent control but tenant eviction delay in case of unpaid rents. Between the moment when the landlord has decided to complain and the moment when the tenant has to leave, 6 months can pass (and even several years).
I concur with the previous points re: UK academic titles. Note that Nuffield College, which I suppose wouldn’t sound like much to someone who hadn’t heard of it, is part of Oxford. A readership at Oxford is about the most prestigious title an academic can get in the UK; a professorship means the department chair, which many researchers dread because of the bureaucratic and administrative hassles.
So if these positions are actively debated in France, and accepted dogma in the US and West Germany (or were, ca. 1981, as Mathieu P. points out), what does that say about the state of the profession in each country?
It almost seems as if the OP is employing the vox populi fallacy to sneer at the French for not taking for granted what everyone else takes for granted. But without a substantive argument to confirm the conventional wisdom, how much is it really worth? Unexamined beliefs are far more likely to contain undiscovered errors.
(Also, re the exchange rate question, I assume the question was asked in different languages in different countries. I wonder if the word used to translate that undefined vague quality, “effective”, has different connotations in the different languages, or the economists’ jargon associated with each. Considering they were literally not answering the same question, it doesn’t *necessarily* reflect a substantive difference of opinion – although obviously the French question was one on which there is *some* difference of opinion *within France*.)
I concur with the previous points re: UK academic titles. Note that Nuffield College, which I suppose wouldn’t sound like much to someone who hadn’t heard of it, is part of Oxford. A readership at Oxford is about the most prestigious title an academic can get in the UK; a professorship means the department chair, which many researchers dread because of the bureaucratic and administrative hassles.
I’m coming a little late to this discussion, and let me declare an interest in that Marion is a friend of mine. But I think it’s wrong to say that “A readership at Oxford is about the most prestigous title an academic can get in the UK” and that — at Oxford — “a professorship means the department chair”. The latter is historically true at most (departmentalized) universities in the UK, but at Oxford and Cambridge it’s not the case that a Professorship — that is, a Chair — wouldn’t be preferred over a readership. Moreover, in Harrod’s case in particular it’s not true. See, for instance, the brief discussion here, by Daniele Besomi (Harrod’s biographer) which ends as follows:
Harrod himself would have preferred a Chair to his Readership, and at least in the Oxbridge case I think this is generally true.
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