“Original” Institutional Economics

3 November 2006 at 10:55 am Peter G. Klein 3 comments

| Peter Klein |

Nicolai has noted that evolutionary economics is weak on public policy. But things may be changing. The theme for the 2007 meeting of the Association for Evolutionary Economics is “Contributions of Institutional Economics to Public Policy Debates: Past and Present.” Here is the call for papers.

Note that “evolutionary” is defined here as “institutional/evolutionary.” The instructions say the papers “must be grounded in and contribute to the literature of Original Institutional Economics in the tradition of Commons, Veblen, Mitchell, Kapp, Myrdal, Polyani, etc.”

I confess this is the first I’ve seen the term “original institutional economics.” I can see why the organizers prefer it to “old institutional economics,” the term used by new institutional economists to describe the early twentieth-century American institutionalists whose contributions are largely forgotten today. (Coase: “Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.” )

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Evolutionary Economics, Institutions.

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3 Comments Add your own

1. Shawn Ritenour | 4 November 2006 at 3:00 pm

Peter,

Do you have the citation for the Coase quotation? I’d like to look it up for my History of Economic Thought course.

Best wishes,

Shawn
2. Jung-Chin Shen | 4 November 2006 at 4:10 pm

Coase, R. 1984. The New Institutional Economics. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 140 (March): 299-231. P. 230.
3. Peter Klein | 4 November 2006 at 11:52 pm

Coase has a gift for one-liners. Another favorite: “In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.” (The Firm, the Market, and the Law, p. 185).