This is an excellent book that should be read by professional economists, and others interested in the history of the discipline. It provides a history of the confrontation between neoclassical and institutional economics between the wars.

It illuminates many puzzles. Central is that of the ideas that dominated post-war Western (especially Anglo-Saxon) policy making. That is, until economists came through who could do the maths (rather than things like Edgeworth boxes) who ran the show? Why were people like Wesley C. Mitchell, Arthur Burns and others, who played dominant roles in US conomic policy-making, so very different in approach and attitude to what followed once Samuelson and others had effected the mathematical revolution.

The crucial point made is that both institutionalists and the necoclassicals they fought were swept away by the post-war mathematicisation of economics. In this sense, neo-institutionalists are no more modern-day institutionalists than neo-classicals are modern classical economists. The failed institionalist attempt to create a basis for economics that would start from a fresh examination of the massive amounts of data that was coming available sits beside the gathering evidence that modern econometrics, co-integration and all, in effect does little more. Thus the massive tensions remain, for example between the exogenous preferences assumptions that penetrate economics as taught, and the need to address such issues as the data presents them.

A great book.

Adam Fforde