The Age of Economic Measurement: 2001 Supplement (Volume 33) (History of Political Economy Annual Supplement)

The 20th-century could be justifiably called the age of measurement, yet few scholars have looked at the development of measurement and its impact on economics. What accounted for the emergence and establishment of economic measurement as a critical component of modern economics? What questions and problems created the drive to measurement, and how have economists reacted to the changing status of numbers in their field? The eleven essays presented here include the work of William Stanley Jevons, Irving Fisher, Lucien March, Wassily Leontief, Richard Stone, and A.F.W. Crome, as well as discussions of events connected with the Federal Reserve Bank and the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. In addition, four perspectives placed throughout the volume consider the paths just covered and the vistas that lay ahead. The Age of Economic Measurement is the 2001 supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 2001 subscribers will receive a copy as part of their annual subscription.

Judy L. Klein is professor of economics at Mary Baldwin College.
Mary S. Morgan, Fellow of the British Academy and Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam. She has published on a range of topics in the history and philosophy of economics: from statistics to experiments to narrative, and from nineteenth-century Social Darwinism to game theory in the Cold War. Her previous books include The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Models as Mediators (Cambridge University Press, 1999, co-edited with Margaret Morrison). She has also edited collections on measurement, policy making with models and the development of probability thinking. In the broader sphere, the collection of essays How Well Do Facts Travel? (Cambridge University Press, 2011, co-edited with Peter Howlett) marks the conclusion of a major interdisciplinary team project on evidence in the sciences and humanities. Professor Morgan is currently engaged in the project 'Re-thinking Case Studies Across the Social Sciences' as a British Academy-Wolfson Research Professor, this year as a Davis Center Fellow at Princeton University.

Waltraud Schelkle is a sociologist and Programme Manager of the Interdisciplinary Research Groups of the Berlin Wolf-Hagan Krauth is Associate Professor of International Economic Relations at the Free University of Berlin.
Martin Kohli is Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin.
Georg Elwert is Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin.
E. Roy Weintraub is a Professor of Economics and Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science, Duke University. He is the author of GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS: STUDIES IN APPRAISAL (Michigan, 1993); STABILIZING DYNAMICS: CONSTRUCTING ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE (Cambridge, 1991); MATHEMATICS FOR ECONOMISTS: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH (Cambridge, 1982); MICROFOUNDATIONS: THE COMPATIBILITY OF MICROECONOMICS AND MACROECONOMICS (Cambridge, 1979); CONFLICT AND CO-OPERATION IN ECONOMICS (Macmillan, 1975); GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY (Macmillan, 1974). He is the co-editor of the Science and Cultural Theory series at Duke University Press.

E. Roy Weintraub is Professor of Economics at Duke University. He is the editor of Toward a History of Game Theory, also published by Duke University Press, and the author of numerous books, including Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge.

Kevin D. Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Duke University. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He developed his interest in applied macroeconomics early in his career while working at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Before moving to Duke, Hoover taught economics at the University of California, Davis, and at Oxford. He is the author of The New Classical Macroeconomics (1988), Causality in Macroeconomics (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics (Cambridge University Press, 2001), as well as nine edited volumes and more than 100 academic articles on macroeconomics, monetary economics, econometrics, the methodology and philosophy of economics, and the history of economic thought. He is past chairman of the International Network for Economic Method, the past president of the History of Economics Society and a former editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is currently the editor of the journal History of Political Economy and a Fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.