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1988 AEI Economist 1 (1988)

handle is hein.amenin/aeieco1988 and id is 1 raw text is: the economist ,American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Aanuary 1988 The State of Economics Herbert Stein The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics* is the best comprehensive picture of economics we are likely to see in this generation. One may complain about the dictionary in some respects. But the editors have done a herculean job with great success, and they deserve the gratitude of everyone interested in economics. One may also complain about the economics pic- tured in the dictionary, and pictured on the whole accurately. Very much of it is incomprehensible to many concerned readers, including me-more in- comprehensible than it needs to be. Some of it is irritatingly opinionated, asserting the truth of propo- sitions that are at best highly uncertain. Page after page reveals the limitations of what economists know and the difficulty of learning more. But when one recovers from the discouragement of all this, one realizes that there are fascinating hypotheses and insights, the product of sophisticated, serious, pow- erful minds. And if we do not know very much we have at least made a start, because we no longer know so much that isn't true. The New Palgrave is new because there was a Dictionary of Political Economy, edited by R. S. Ingles Palgrave, published in three volumes in 1894, 1896, and 1899. Another edition, consisting mainly of the original material but with some corrections and additions, was published in 1923-1926. The present Palgrave is entirely new except for about fifty articles reprinted from the original, pre- sumably mainly for antiquarian reasons. It comes in Herbert Stein is a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. four volumes of about 1,000 large pages each, which amount to about 4 million words. It contains about 2,000 articles by about 900 different authors. The list of authors includes a large proportion of all the lead- ing contemporary economists, including eight who have won Nobel prizes in economics. (One might think that a dictionary of economics would have an article on the Nobel prize, including a list of winners to date, but it does not.) About 700 of the 2,000 articles are biographies of economists born in 1915 or earlier. The dictionary is a dictionary of economic thought, not an encyclopedia or almanac of informa- tion about the economy of the world or of any coun- Page after page of the New Palgrave reveals the limitations of what economists know and the difficulty of learning more. try at any time. Presumably that is why the biogra- phies include Joseph Stalin, in his capacity as theoretician of socialism-but not Franklin D. Roosevelt, who created or stumbled into the Ameri- can mixed economy. It includes Harry D. White, mainly for his contribution to the birth of Bretton Woods, but not Richard Nixon for his contribution to ending Bretton Woods. The editors claim for the New Palgrave the audi- ence Palgrave claimed for the original-the student. *Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter New- man (London: The Macmillan Press Limited, 1987) (Pub- lished in the United States and Canada by The Stockton Press, New York, $650). The AEI Economist I 1

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