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459 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1982)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0459 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE During the past decade, there has been a widely held view that the discipline of economics is in disarray. While economists in advanced indus- trial societies have been quite useful in telling governments what policies not to adopt, they have been much less successful in specifying what govern- ments should do in order to achieve impressive economic performance.1 Meanwhile, governments, wishing to achieve impressive economic per- formance, have had very high expectations from economists. Understand- ably, policymakers want to predict the consequences that are likely to follow from their policies, but increasingly the discipline of economics has demon- strated that it has a very low success rate in forecasting beyond short-term phenomena. In all advanced industrial societies, the role of government in shaping economic performance is substantial. While economists play an important role in shaping governmental economic policy, the economists' models are very simplistic, and this is the basic reason that the discipline of economics is in a state of crisis. Whereas conventional economics seeks to explain economic performance with parsimonious theories of factor supply, demand, pricing, and marketing organization, a number of other social scientists have, during the past decade, attempted to explain economic performance by relying on more complex models. One might refer to these noneconomists as the new political economists. Instead of focusing exclu- sively on economic variables to explain economic performance, the political economists assume that the structure and performance of economic institu- tions and political institutions are inseparable. In short, the political econo- mist argues that economic performance may be explained only by focusing serious consideration on the social-structural and political-institutional arrangements of the society. Consistent with this strategy, recent social scientists have demonstrated with cross-national research that there are substantial regularities between the way that power is organized among various groups and the performance of national economies. Specifically, the research has attemp- ted to explain such questions as the following: why do nations differ in their levels of unemployment; in equality in income distribution; and in rates of change in economic growth, productivity, and inflation? And in an effort to confront these questions, one political economy study after another has NOTE: Articles in this issue of The Annals were presented at a workshop on The Role of Government in Shaping Economic Performance, University of Wisconsin, Madison, March 26 and 27, 1981. Funds for the workshop were provided by the Anonymous Fund, College of Letters and Sciences, University of Wisconsin; the Council for European Studies; and the German Marshall Fund. The editor especially thanks Dean David Cronon of the University of Wisconsin for helping to make the workshop possible. Ellen Jane Hollingsworth provided valuable assistance in the editing of the articles. 1. For a discussion of the problems facing the discipline of economics, see The Public Interest (special issue, The Crisis in Economic Theory, 1980). 9

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