- $1 billion Empire State Building IPO: why it won't be like Facebook IPO
- In surprise move, GOP leaders admit defeat in payroll tax battle
- More than 30,000 Germans turn out against anti-piracy treaty ACTA
- Does Obama blueprint reduce budget deficit fast enough? (+video)
- Pentagon budget: Does it pit active-duty forces against retirees? (+video)
- Murdoch media crisis deepens with five new arrests
- How Pinterest combines the best parts of Facebook, Tumblr, and Etsy
- US, China face 'trust deficit' as China's heir apparent visits
'There is no such thing as macroeconomics.'
Armen Alchian, who said this, features prominently in a new history of UCLA's economics department.
Campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, seen in October, 1997. William Allen, UCLA economist, recently released his memoirs.
Melanie Stetson Freeman / The Christian Science Monitor / File
Not my words, but those of Armen Alchian, as reported by William Allen in Econ Journal Watch. Allen has written his memoirs and a history of UCLAs economics department in “A Life Among the Econ, Particularly at UCLA.” To a great extent, it is the story of Alchian and the core group around him in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Allen was co-author with Alchian of University Economics, an influential undergraduate textbook that inspired Paul Heyne’s Economic Way of Thinking.
Skip to next paragraph
A blog of the NYU Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes: A Modern Perspective on Liberty and Public Issues.
Recent posts
-
03.10.11
Easy money and economic illusions -
03.07.11
The genius of Max Weber -
02.26.11
Let them eat microchips! -
02.24.11
Carl Menger still woth reading -
02.23.11
Is the Fed building sandcastles?
My own way of thinking was influenced as much by the UCLA tradition as by Mises and Hayek. Mises and Hayek had an important influence on that tradition, however. An emphasis on decision making under uncertainty and incomplete information was its hallmark. All social phenomena could be analyzed by economics, and the economic analysis was micro.
Alchian didn’t deny there were aggregate economic phenomena, only that theory must be microeconomic. In substance, that was Hayek’s view.
Graduate macro classes had as much micro in them as designated micro class. Alchian wrote many of the macro prelim questions, wrongly attributed by students to Axel Leijonhufvud.
Among the luminaries who came and stayed in this period were Harold Demsetz and Robert Clower. Among those who came and left were James Buchanan, Sam Peltzman and Thomas Sowell. My dissertation committee consisted of Leijonhufvud (Chair), Peltzman and Sowell.
Add/view comments on this post.
------------------------------
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
Become part of the Monitor community
36K on Facebook | 12K on Twitter | 2,250 on YouTube