Today, we have Mr. Keith Royer, who's going to be talking about an early American economist,
Davenport and his, Herbert Davenport and his political economy.
Keith is a PhD student in economics here at Auburn University.
He's a Mises Fellow, of course, and he teaches economics at Auburn, and as a matter of fact,
Keith won the Graduate Teaching Award this year in the department, which is always a great thing.
I always like to see the Austrians racking up those kinds of awards.
So congratulations, Keith, and let's hear your stuff.
Okay, thank you, Mark. Let me start off with, I've been to a number of the Brown Bags this year,
and they all seem to have their own flavor.
I will emphasize the informality of the Brown Bag seminar, also emphasize the seminar part of the seminar.
So speak up if you have questions or if you want to add something.
I'll take a very informal approach to this.
This assignment was originally given to me back in the early part of this year
to decide whether Herbert Davenport was an American-Austrian scholar of the early part of the century.
of the Century. My method of research on deciding this, and I will maybe let everyone make up
their own mind given what I have to present here today and not be decisive myself, but
my method of research has not been to go back and read over all of his works. Because of
time limitations for one, I've gone to the other scholars. I've gone to Mark Blogg,
There's Eklund and Iberia, their text, a guy named Haney, Whitaker, some other history
of thought type people to see what they have to say, where they put him, Schumpeter especially,
how they would characterize Herbert Davenport.
So that's been my method.
If there are any true Davenport scholars here, that probably wouldn't be to your liking,
but as I say, he wrote four major books and we'll talk about that in just a moment.
As an introduction, Herbert Davenport was born in Wilmington, Vermont in 1861. He passed
away in 1931. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1898. He
studied in Paris. He studied at South Dakota and one other place. I can't remember where
and I don't seem to have it written down here, but he studied abroad. He studied here. He
taught at the University of Chicago from 1902 to 1908. From there he was the Dean of one
of the schools at the University of Missouri from 1908 to 1916. And from there he spent
the latter part of his life from 1916 to 1929 as a professor of economics at Cornell. In
In 1920, Herbert Davenport was the president of the American Economic Association, and
I will also emphasize the political economy part of this seminar, and I will quote a good
deal from this AEA address that he gave in 1920.
It's quite telling, possibly.
It's offered by people like James Buchanan that Davenport's relative obscurity, and indeed
Indeed, he is rather obscure even in the history of thought texts that I've found out.
Professors Eaklin and Abert do not have a site that important in their text.
Schumpeter, in his history of economic analysis, has four sites in the index.
He has four page references, but those are small.
You know, just mentioning of a name, they don't go into any extensive detail as to his
thought.
Schumpeter said if he had more time and space, he would gladly do that. Take that with a grain of salt. I'm not sure.
We've got a thousand page book. Percentage wise, James Buchanan has a, if you take percentage, is a more favorable disposition on Davenport, possibly, that he commits two pages of a hundred page text to Davenport.
What was the book that... Cost and Calculation, which I'll speak of here in a moment.
Buchanan comments that Davenport was relatively obscure and had a small following of students in his day,
mainly because he failed to articulate his ideas well, and he had a pestilence toward the idols of the profession of the day.
He liked to badmouth people, evidently, especially Marshall, although some people lump him in
together with the Marshallian analysis.
But as I continue, we'll see some of this maybe badmouthing come about.
Over his career, he did author four books, Outlines of Economic Theory in 1896, Value
and Distribution, which seemed to be maybe the capstone of his work.
I'm going to say that it's difficult mining, but once you get there, it's rather rich.
That particular book in Economics of Enterprise in 1913, and The Economics of Alfred Marshall
published husturously in 1935.
Mark Blog comments that Davenport was a pupil and admirer of Veblen, although Davenport
Davenport sought an economic theory based on prices and excluding the psychological elements
of Marshall and the Austrians.
He was pretty explicit in some of his, like I say, he was kind of nasty at times evidently,
according to Frank Wetter and others, but he was rather explicit and he called into
question a lot of the Austrian doctrine of the time, which may be important in that he
was maybe commenting on Menger and some of the early Austrians, which maybe today's Austrians
At the turn of the centuries, writers such as Cassel and Valraud were attempting to limit
the field of study of economics to something that's solvable by a system of equations.
A separate branch or a competing branch of theory at the time was divergent to this and
wanted to avoid ethical and philosophical complications to get rid of difference between
costs and wants. There were two competing branches at this time. One was this mathematical
His attempt in his economics was to reduce costs to the subjective opportunities foregone
by entrepreneurs.
That sounds rather Austrian. We've got subjective opportunities there and we've got the entrepreneur.
And in fact Buchanan claims that Davenport's emphasis on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial cost
stem from his criticism of other writers at the time, once again criticism, especially or notably of Marshall.
And Davenport writes that Marshall's analysis of the relationship between rent and cost is so unsatisfactory
Psychology, due to the fact that he has not appreciated that cost is bearing upon supply
is not a collectivist phenomenon, but is strictly an entrepreneurial competition and as such
is exclusively within the sphere of the individual psychology.
Not a page before, at the top of this page I'm talking that he wants to get rid of psychology,
the psychological elements out of economics and halfway down the page he's trying to put
It's unfortunate that in reading through what other historians had to say about Davenport,
you go back and look at some of these references, it's rather foggy, it's rather murky.
He seems to jump around quite a bit, and this will come out at the end also.
I think it kind of shows all the way through this discussion.
So, Buchanan claims embedded in Davenport's value and distribution is a concept of opportunity
and Opportunity Cost, almost as sophisticated as Vickseed's, and he puts Davenport in his Cost and Calculation,
Buchanan's Cost and Calculation, he places Davenport between Vickseed and Knight in development of theory.
So that kind of gives a historical perspective there.
Although Davenport had the idea of Subjective Opportunity Cost in common with the Austrians,
He rejected, and this is the way it's put, and this is the way I kind of caution that
it may be looking at the older Austrians and not necessarily a reformed Austrian school
or however you want it, the Misesian school or whatever, is that he rejected the hedonism
of the Austrian school of the day and their idea that marginal utility was causal.
So he rejects, and we've talked about this in the office earlier, he rejects the idea
that marginal utility causes action.
I think that would be counter to what Austrians would say at the day or even today, is that
marginal utility doesn't cause one to value a good.
I think he disagrees with this, this marginal utility analysis, that marginal utility was
the causing factor in acting.
So you have to keep that in mind, maybe that's a point.
According to Haney, who writes a history of thought book, this idea, this denying the
marginal utility as being causal and whatnot.
This equates Devenport more closely with mathematical price economists of the time.
So we get a very, it becomes very murky, Haney puts him in more with Marchellians, but he
denies himself to be, and he actually criticizes Marshall.
So you get very divergent views as to where this man actually stands in the spectrum here.
Devenport's training was as a classical economist, though he was not at the time nor today would
would be considered a mathematical economist.
Davenport rejects this idea of hedonism, of the calculation of pleasure and pain, of the
Austrian schools and Jevons. These writers at the time tend to put Jevons in with the
Austrians, in with the subjectivism, and Jevons drawing of a marginal, if we can imagine the
demand curve sloping downward, that this is a marginal utility curve. And as you consume
and more along this axis than your marginal benefit decreases, diminishes.
And so this is the idea from, I guess, Dupuis and Jevons that we have this.
And so Davenport rejects this, this particular idea.
And he says that these curves are more, once again, Marcellian in derivation, that they
come strictly from the market.
We draw supply and demand curves strictly given prices on the market.
Strange to figure out, strange to figure out.
Davenport's theory does adopt the entrepreneur's point of view and related opportunity costs,
subjective opportunity costs that I've already alluded to, but he assumes that prices are
given and he assumes prices to be given and makes utilities and disutilities depend on
on the Prices. Instead of marginal utility being the causal factor on prices, it's prices
that determine our utility. I think it's backwards from what Austrians would espouse. And in
fact, I mean, he says it is. This dependency, he comments, works through a volunteeristic
Acquisitive Opportunities, which present themselves in markets.
Now, this point sounds very much like a Kirznerian.
The entrepreneur as not as a seeker of opportunity, but the entrepreneur, I think, as Joseph Salerno
has said of the guy walking down the street saying the dollar bill lay on the floor or
lay on the street that he just sees it from the market and he grabs it from the market,
not someone who, what we would think of as an entrepreneur going and trying to find profitable
of Opportunities." He waits for the market to indicate them to him. Once again, maybe
somewhat backwards from what we would associate with Austrian theory. As commented earlier,
Davenport wanted to read Economic Theory of Psychological Factors of Explanation. To
this end, he commented that the interest rate, and this is, once again, he gets a little
confused, the interest rate is determined by the supply and demand in the market. No
No doubt psychological factors lie behind why people lend and borrow, but this is for
the psychologists to study.
These psychological factors are not within the province of the study of economics.
So he's wanting to keep these psychological factors out.
He admits that they're there.
We're just not going to study them as economists.
Another historian, Whitaker, points out that both Castle and Davenport were associated
with this movement to rid economics of these psychological factors, but they both from
and time to time let these factors slip into their analysis.
This following passage from Davenport's Economic and Enterprise is a good example.
For each individual, consumption stops and saving begins where the advantages from saving,
whatever these may be, make an appeal strong enough to displace present consumption.
So we've got the psychological factors there, he's talking about the psychological factors
When the subjective theorizing turned to wealth and what was to be considered as wealth, Davenport
was fairly modern in his thinking on this particular point.
Davenport declared using the subjective idea, Davenport declared that it was not the economist
place to enter into ethical judgments and therefore the economist could not say what
did or did not constitute wealth.
This is from the Economics of Enterprise. He comments, and I need help. I cannot find this in a dictionary. Does anyone know what Peruna is?
P-E-R-U-N-A. It's evidently a drug of some sort from something I read.
It's a patent medicine.
It's a patent medicine?
Yeah.
Okay. He mentions this, and in another passage I'll read just in a moment, Federer mentions it. I can't find it in a dictionary anywhere.
This is from the economics of enterprise. Pruna, hop bitters, obscene literature, indecent paintings, picture hats, and corsets are wealth, irrespective of any ethical or conventional test to which they may or may not conform. Being marketable, price-bearing, they are wealth. What is the economist that he should go behind the market fact and set up a social philosophy of ultimate appraisals? To the above definition of wealth,
Frank Feder in a 1914 JPE article reviewing the economics of enterprise. He must have been replying to this. Feder was replying to this particular topic, or this particular piece, when he comments somewhat disapprovingly that Peruna, as an example of harmful yet valued products, is administered in large doses, and burglars with their jimmies and loosely
And these women, with their flaunty appeals, appear so often that they make some chapters of this book appear like an evening at the uncensored movies.
So, if nothing else, these guys could write well.
So, Feder in reviewing the economics of enterprise, that's what he had to say about Davenport's work here, or at least in part.
Feder goes on to say that, indifferent to the larger social spirit which has pervaded economic writings and political economy, Davenport characterizes them as if we were still in the days of Nassau Senior at his worst.
He, Davenport, scouts political economy as a pious aspiration, busy picturing utopias, lacking all touch with life, a sheer farce.
And this I think some would probably still comment today that Marshall and some of the others were maybe utopian dreamers looking for zero transaction cost world and what not.
So he may not be completely wrong in that, but he was right, I guess he had a rather biting pen when he wrote.
So Davenport describes contemporary early 20th century economics as a system of apologetics, the creed of the reactionary, a defense of privilege, a social soothing syrup,
Green Syrup, a smug pronouncement of the righteousness of whatever is, with a still more disastrous
colliery of the unrighteousness of whatever is not.
Feder comments in his review that such extravagance and rhetoric is expected from self-trained
zealots such as Henry George or the persecuted revolutionary Karl Marx, but that even they
do not excel in some part of Davenport's language.
So get a taste there for some of his writing maybe.
The next section that I'll hit upon here, I kind of broke this down in sections, actually
this is the last one, broke it down into different topics that Davenport wrote on.
And this is Wealth and Taxation, and Davenport claims in Economics of Enterprise that two
Davenport claims that two-thirds of the durable private basis of income in the U.S. are nothing
else than capitalization of privilege or predation.
So he feels that everyone is either privileged of the privileged class or predatory.
He continues that five-ninths of the durable wealth reported by the census is made up of
privately appropriated social wealth.
These observations, Davenport declared, show the inadequacy of a single tax program.
This reasoning carries Davenport into what Frank Federitz called radical communism, although
in 1913 Davenport claims to have no socialistic sympathies.
Let me read now from his AEA address. This was published in the March 1921, if anyone
wants to look that up, AER, lead article. And this was his address on December 20, 1920,
to the American Economic Association.
I am, that is to say, convincingly, even I suspect dogmatically, a Democrat, in the sense
I believe thoroughly in popular government, in the equality of individuals, in political rights and responsibilities, as also in the high and substantive value of freedom in its own behalf.
I do not, however, ascribe to political freedom any essential sanctity of ultimate or natural or inevitable rightness.
Democracy may easily approach to the worst of all forms of government, in danger of being no government at all, but mere license, disorder, revolution and counterrevolution, in the degree that any people fall short of meeting its severe requirements.
A populace incapable of understanding its own needs, but attempting to rule in its own interest, is almost certain to blunder into its own great harm.
and the Great Harm. It might better rely on such incidental welfare as maybe fall from an intelligent and efficient government conducted primarily in another interest.
He continues on, political democracy is doubtless as readily possible in a collective as in a competitive economic order.
Perhaps, indeed, it is more easily possible in the sense of making call for less vigilant
intelligence in a more collective environment.
We have less vigilant intelligence.
But I am not a socialist for no other or better reason than that I am unable to make out what
the socialist ideal, what is the socialist ideal, the family writ large, the brotherhood
of Man would concretely turn out to be or do, but further I hold with the practical
working necessity of competition and of competition within as well as without the economic field.
Finally that also I seem to myself to know that it is not all wholesome and that some
of its unregulated workings are pernicious and extremely dangerous, not merely directly
to the general welfare but to the very perpetuity of competitive institutions, a regulated competition
I take to be imperative.
Robert Reich, enter.
If competition is to be and to remain a tolerable system, successful competitive institutions
I hold require an intelligent guidance, which so far they've measurably lacked.
It's a little iffy here.
Iffy is, as I conclude here at the bottom of my paper, I'll read one more and then give
you this conclusion.
Higher Inheritance Taxes? Yes, say I, who in order that the competitive system may both
endure and deserve to endure would check economic stratification, would hinder the emergence
of differentials and handicaps. If also the socialist says yes, as directed by his opposition
to Private Property in General, we can so far work together instead of at cross purposes.
So if you're willing to walk the road with a socialist, that's fine. We can do that.
Our differences are not actual. We desire the same particular thing, the thing at hand,
only with different ends. I advocate progressive taxation in general in order to mitigate the
economic inequality that in my view is putting in hazard the political and economic democracy
Policy of the Competitive Order. If to my socialistic neighbor the same policy appeals,
as a step toward the abandonment of the competitive order, it is still true that on either basis
of policy the thing is good.
I conclude, and I will conclude here and take questions, I conclude that it may be claimed
It seemed that Davenport had some ideas in common with the early Austrians.
The subjective opportunity cost idea was there.
It definitely was.
Schumpeter, in his History of Economic Analysis, one of the few places in which he quotes and
does, kind of put him in that camp with the early Austrians because of this idea.
However, if we do do this and you kind of have the entrepreneurial idea, although it
I don't know if we want to call him a fellow traveler, honestly.
If he is an Austrian, he's definitely not a classical liberal.
We generally associate the one with the other.
So I know Mr. Rockwell told me that Murray was going to write, had he lived long enough
to, in his third volume, on Davenport.
I would like to know, I wish I did know what he had to say.
Rothbard's Man Economy and State has one reference to Davenport only, and it's just a reference to a paper that he wrote on costs.
So, I don't know, it would be tough. Tough to call him an Austrian, I'm not sure.
You said he went to school in Chicago?
Yeah. He got his Ph.D. at Chicago and he taught evidently at Missouri, which I think Jeff has discovered that, who was there?
Yeah, F.A. Harper apparently was a student. And F.A. Harper was the founder of the Institute for Human Studies.
Yeah.
And a professor at Cornell.
Who was he? Say, there is not, honestly, there is not a whole lot out there. And from this, I'm not a socialist, but we'll walk together if you want to.
When Buchanan writes about him, does he specifically praise his inheritance tax ideas?
No, no. Buchanan strictly talks about his cost idea.
It's strictly the opportunity, the subjective opportunity cost idea.
And that is, I think that would be, you know, put that block over here in the Austrian School, that's fine.
Like I said though, he's not a classical liberal, that's for sure.
Well, you could call it New York University. Those folks are always looking for socialist Austrians to demonstrate that Austrian economics is for a visa tradition.
What about that? Who does he reference, or what does he say?
I've not seen a reference to Menger in any of the books, to Carl Menger. I saw a reference to Anton. Is that his father?
His brother.
His brother. I'd heard the name, I couldn't place it. But there's a reference to Anton, but not to Carl.
In his book on cost and distribution, he does reference Carl Menger once on the origin of money or something like that, but there's more references to Anton.
I'm curious about this notion of being critical of Marshall. I've read parts of his book on Marshall, and it kind of makes sense now, because he lumps Marshall in with the classicals.
He puts Marshall in with the classicals, and accuses him of just sort of being a mathematizer of Mill, and picking up on Malfus Mill, and making all the same mistakes that they made.
And it's kind of interesting now to know that, get an idea that he wasn't really a classical liberal,
that he could be critical, that he could be saying that about Marshall and I at the time.
Did he teach at Chicago when you said he taught at Chicago? Is that just like right after he graduated or did he come back?
He came back, he got his degree in 98 and then he taught there from 1902 to 1908.
So he was gone for a few years. I got that biographical type information from Mark Laws, who's who in economics. And that's all he had was those years at Chicago and then at Missouri and then at Cornell.
You know, but then he was at Cornell and wasn't Knight, did Knight graduate from Cornell at about the time that he would have been teaching?
And see, there's the, what I was thinking of is in terms of the connection that you can into Knight.
Sure.
Yeah.
That if there was a connection between Davenport and Knight directly.
Yeah, that could be.
both that Knight might have been a student of Davenport.
Yeah, that could be.
Buchanan doesn't make any reference to such a scenario,
but that could very well be.
Keith, not knowing much about this literature,
I know that every time I defend to any of the American economists
from this period, they all seem crazy to me.
They're touting central banking and progressive income tax and anti-trust law, every horrible thing you can think of.
So I wonder if you have to be sort of forgiving in the sense of Davenport's errors, given the profession of the time and the dominant strings,
and sort of look for the good part of Davenport and ask whether or not he was sort of better than his contemporaries, so that's a relevant comparison. What do you think about that?
I don't know. I would, after just reading the excerpt here from, or reading his presidential address, that'd be a little tough for me to make that,
to be that forgiving for a person to be in such a position to make such statements.
I mean, he may have been caught up in the, you know, the progressiveness at the time of the progressive era.
Maybe he's talking about speaking for the profession as a whole.
Yeah, it could be.
I think this point is right in the sense that American economics was backwater relative to, you know,
Really, American economists, on average, were major...
U.S. didn't really become the center of economic bonds in World War II or after that.
In the early 20th century, Vienna and Cambridge and Stockholm, I guess, were the places where...
Those were the real centers.
And America was a bunch of fudges.
Pete, if Davenport called Marshall and others utopians, a pie of sky sort of people, what was his approach to economics? Was he more a Vevlenian Darwinist?
Well, he definitely studied with Vevlen. I'm not sure, throw me the Darwinist, I'm not sure about that. He definitely studied with Vevlen, he didn't want to study the institutions.
What were the tools that you used?
Strictly verbal analysis. I mean, no, no Marshalian supply and demand from what I can tell, using the marginal opportunity cost idea.
He used that, which was definitely Austrian. I'm not sure that I can answer your question any fuller than that.
I was struck in some of the quotations that you were reading. It seems that, if I remember right from the article by McNulty on the origin, on the changing use of the word competition in economics, it was right about this time, when Davenport was writing, when the term competition began to be used by economists in a way different from the common sense notion of rivalry or struggle, which is the way modern Austrians interpret competition.
But rather towards the modern neoclassical version of describing a set of conditions, large numbers of anonymous buyers and sellers and so on.
And it seems like Davenport has that notion of competition in mind.
Of the rivalries?
No, he has the latter. He has the static notion with your quotations about concerns about large accumulations of wealth as sort of deviations from competition.
Well, yeah, and the predation of one.
I may have read those out of context from your remarks.
I would say that once again it just comes from Veblen, I guess Veblen despised capitalism and the accumulation of wealth.
What's your sense of that importance?
I would probably shoot that over and say it kind of picks up on what Paul was saying.
That's the utopia. That's the bad mouth and these utopian thinkers of perfect information and this competitive system.
So, in that respect, and maybe he did have the rivalry idea there.
Does that answer?
I mean, it could be.
I think that might be the utopia that Paul was talking about, these utopian thinkers,
because that's, I mean, we talk about that, this utopia of zero transaction costs world
perfect competition, everybody knows everything, you know, let's get on with the day.
kind of utopia that I think he was actually bad-mouthing that what I was
going to say it seemed to me in some of those quotes when he's talking about
you're speaking of the need for inheritance taxes and the rest of
taxation or state capital yeah my impression was that Davenport claimed
that in order for the system to be competitive certain controls had to be
in place to make sure that. Yeah, but I don't think it was the rival risk. My point is that if that is what he meant, then that gives us a clue as to when the word competition came to be used in the modern way as opposed to the way the common sense was.
It's unclear, though, why he thought that this inequality of income was going to hurt the competitive system.
It could be almost like a Schumpeterian, in the sense that capitalism is trying to sell it and that, you know, the haves and the have-nots are going to go crazy and it's not going to happen now, at least.
He refuses to offer any opinion about whether, what is this, pornography and funny hats and this patent of medicine or whatever.
and he thinks that they all constitute wealth if people regard them as wealth, right, so he doesn't have anything to say about them, but somehow if you get too many funny hats and too much pornography, then you have to take it away, right, under the accumulation of wealth.
Well, one of the things that I think helps clear up some of this, you know, uncertainty
as to what he's saying, because he's wanting to eliminate the psychological, although he's
subjective on cost and apparently he's not proselytizing about the way people choose
or what types of goods they choose, based on another quote, but it seems to me I remember
that he wanted to equate value with price, instead of creating a different category for
Subjective Value and another category for exchange value of price.
He wanted to equate value, it was directly with price, and so I think he understands
subjective value of goods and the subjective notion of cost, but when it comes down to
I can't remember, I don't have it in my notes here, he spoke a good deal about the price
and the market price being, it was a price, I can't say this very well, it would be meaningless.
We talk about price theory, we can easily talk about micro-price theory or whatever,
and his was strictly, what you were talking about, looking strictly at the price as given
by the market, and gaining value from that, yeah, I think so.
What do you mean exactly gaining value from the price gain?
That you, once again, it's not the marginal utility that you cause value to a good, it's
What's the good? Causes you utility or disutility based on price? Yeah, based upon price. Yeah, I mean it comes back, it comes from the market to you.
It's a price that's somewhat exogenous to sort of come from the market and interpret the value based on that.
I think so.
The only thing that's measurable is market price, all these ruminations about what's behind market price are, you know, they're there all right, but who cares about them?
Let's get on with the deal and take demand curves from, take market curves, start with market demand curves and work from there, and stop, you know, messing around with the basis of them.
Does he give any indication of why the demand curve slows down?
Well, for the same reason as Marshall would, I believe, is that we have...
Well, Marshall starts with the individual stuff, and then discards it pretty soon, but he builds up.
Yeah, I'm not, from what I'm saying, I don't know. I can't answer that intelligently.
He talks about it not being the marginal utility curve of Jevons.
Was there much originality in Davenport? It seems like he's just taking other ideas and recombining them. Did he have any of that?
This gentleman, either Buchanan or Haney or one of these guys said of the value and distribution
that it was tedious but you know there was grains there, there were grains of originality
and I think Schumpeter basically says the same thing but then he doesn't you know devote
any pages in his history of economic analysis to his thoughts so maybe you know a long way
to go for a little.
What about the idea of the entrepreneur? That was not a prominent notion in the economy. Schumpeter came out with this book in 1913 or something. He was in Germany. He tossed out the idea of the entrepreneur.
was been sorely misstudied, or understudied, not misstudied, understudied.
So there could be, yeah.
All in line with what Jeff's saying, I think it's,
I've gotten the impression from what I've been exposed
to to have important classes and so on and so forth.
It was almost a marginal utility theory,
and that is a bunch of independent thinkers
coming up with a similar idea at roughly the same time.
And I think that may be where the entrepreneur,
among American economists, he was one of the first
to sort of develop that notion.
and may have been other economists that have developed it better, but the notion was being
done independently and uniquely by a bunch of different scholars at the same time.
Back to Jess for about Davenport putting him sort of in a relative perspective, and I wasn't
actually aware that he was president of the American Economic Association in 1920, but
To achieve that type of honor, you had to be kind of wacky, in some respect, to get that,
to be able to be appointed president of the American Economic Association.
It hasn't changed much, and actually, I think in many respects, it's probably improved to
some degree.
You have to remember, as Jeff suggests, the current state of the profession, most of the
trained economists were trained in Germany, in the German Historical School, or by their
students here in the United States, and of course his major professor was Vevlin, and
many of the prominent economists in terms of the founding of the American Economic Association
were basically what we wouldn't even consider economists nowadays.
Veblen and Ely and Simon Patton and some of these people who just had outrageous ideas.
And the idea that they might appoint a free market Austrian economist just doesn't compute at all.
at all. They would have never considered somebody along some sort of pure Austrian lines, I
don't think. And like I said, in some respects, the American Economic Association improved
after the rise of Columbia and Chicago and New York in the century, but before that things
were pretty bad in the profession and the only thing I've ever seen by that I've
ever read by Davenport is his value and distribution and it it's see it's pretty
good stuff except for some of these things about value equals price and if
you keep that in mind it's it's pretty good pretty good material we've been
working on the at the workshop on the concept of interest and the concept of
Capital, very rough going. Watch out for that workshop. But, I mean, Davenport, Davenport,
yeah, Davenport, from what I can remember, you know, really seemed to have a really good
idea about what the Austrians were up to and the other theorists, the Clark, Bromberg-Bawerk
debates, all that kind of stuff is in there and it's, he's got a good handle on it.
I remember with respect to Beezer and von Boehm-Bawerk in particular, their views, he understood
them as well as we do nowadays and he kind of attacked Beezer I think for the collectivist,
the more sort of collectivist approach to things and liked von Boehm-Bawerk more so.
Of course, on the other hand, I remember those sites to Menger, too, so, difficult to tell.
I would hate to have the summer end without getting into the leader's position of Davenport.
Do you have an opinion?
I'm not well-read in Davenport, but I have read his sections on macroeconomics, which I think he was quite sound, pretty much ahead of his time.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I guess we'll thank Keith very much for a very tough one.
Thank you very much.