5/2/2021
An Unusual History: A Conversation Between Two Economists About the Economics Department at the University of Chicago Breaking News
Editor’s note [ProMarket]: The current debate in economics seems to lack a historical perspective. To try to address this deficiency, we decided to launch a Sunday column on ProMarket focusing on the historical dimension of economic ideas. You can read all of the pieces in the series here.
housands of pages have been written about the Department of Economics at Chicago. Some works have been celebratory and others have been critical; some have been deep, and others have been superficial. This piece, based on a longer paper, is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, as seen by one of its long-term faculty members Arnold C. Harberger and one of its former students, Sebastian Edwards. The period covered is from 1947 through 1982. That is, 35 years that span form the time Harberger arrived as a stu
During the fall of 2009, George Papandreou headed the ticket of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, known by its acronym PASOK, against the then‐governing conservative party, New Democracy, in the Greek national elections. Papandreou ran on a platform that featured highly expansive fiscal spending. During a press conference on September 13, 2009, he was asked where he would find the money to fund his party’s spending proposals. His answer was that given in the above quotation, by which he meant that Greece had abundant fiscal space to increase government spending; he believed that tax revenues could be sharply raised through stricter enforcement of laws against tax evasion. On October 4, PASOK won a landslide electoral victory, garnering 43.9 percent of the popular vote, compared with 33.5 percent for the second‐place, incumbent New Democracy party, with the result that Papandreou became Greece’s prime minister. In the following months, a sovereign‐debt crisis