Institutional Economics as Seen by an Institutional Economist
1954; Wiley; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1054737
ISSN2325-8012
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Theory and Institutions
ResumoI can best present my ideas about the nature and values of institutional economics by giving a brief account of how I became an institutional economist. Like most others, I am largely a product of my training and experience. Most of my ideas on economics date from my graduate student days and my earliest experiences in governmental service. The economist who most influenced my thinking was John R. Commons. I came to economics and to Commons late in the period of my formal education. As an undergraduate and in the first two years of graduate work, I majored in history. I shifted to economics because my major professor, Frederick Jackson Turner, who first stressed the importance of the frontier in American history, left Wisconsin and told me that the best historian among many good historians on our campus was John R. Commons, although he was attached to the economics department. I had discovered Commons earlier through student debating, which was the center of my interests as an undergraduate. With Turner gone, I took his advice and shifted to economics and to Commons. I have never regretted doing so, although history and biography have ever remained my pastime reading. I had courses with other distinguished economists and learned enough economic theory to pass the Ph.D. examination. But it was principally from Commons that I got the ideas I am expounding in this article. I got these ideas not from what Commons said in class or from his writings, but from working with him on the practical problems in which he was then interested. Commons at that time was formulating the forward looking protective labor legislation which brought great fame to Wisconsin forty years ago: the industrial commission act, workmens' compensation, and improved child labor law, a women's hours of labor law, a minimum wage act, the first modern apprenticeship law, and the present type of industrial safety legislation. He had all of his graduate students work on some aspect of these problems. Ever modest and always giving credit to his students even for ideas which really came from him, he inspired his students to work on the practical problems assigned to them with a devotion and intensity they did not develop in any other courses. They sought answers and were guided to seek facts having bearing on the subject wherever they might be found, regardless of academic disciplines. In the last quarter century of his life, Commons tried to pull together into a comprehensive, systematic body of economic thought the theoretical ideas he
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