IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/vic/vicddp/0104.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Walton Hamilton, Amherst, and the Brookings Graduate School: Institutonal Economics and Education

Author

Abstract

Walton Hamilton was one of the major promoters of American institutionalism in the interwar period. Apart from his own writing - he introduced the term institutional economics into the literature in a 1918 conference paper - Hamilton was closely associated with the creation of educational programs with a decidedly institutionalist orientation. At Amherst College from 1916 to 1923 and at the Robert Brooking Graduate School between 1923 and 1928, Hamilton and his colleagues engaged in interesting experiments in economics education, and produced a quite remarkable stream of graduates. This paper will outline the programs developed by Hamilton, and the subsequent careers of many of the graduates, in both academics (in economics, political science, and law) and in government service. Many of Hamilton's students occupied key positions in the New Deal and, later, in international organizations such as the ILO and United Nations. In 1928 the Institute for Government Research and the Institute of Economics were merged into what became the Brookings Institution, and the Robert Brookings Graduate School was abandoned as a separate entity. The reasons for this seem to have included funding difficulties, internal politics, and Robert Brooking's concerns over the direction the School had taken. The closing of the School was an event that caused much anguish and public dispute. Hamilton left to join Yale Law School, and an important centre for institutional economics was lost. The paper will draw on archive material including the Walton Hamilton Papers, the Archives of the Brookings Institution, and an archive of taped interviews with former graduates of Brookings. These were conducted in the early 1970s by Robert Coleberd as part of a project on the Brookings Graduate School. He never completed this project, and deposited the tapes in the Brookings Institution Archive. As far as I am aware this material has not been accessed before.

Suggested Citation

  • Malcolm Rutherford, 2001. "Walton Hamilton, Amherst, and the Brookings Graduate School: Institutonal Economics and Education," Department Discussion Papers 0104, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
    • Handle: RePEc:vic:vicddp:0104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/_assets/docs/discussion/ddp0104.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Malcolm Rutherford, 2001. "Institutional Economics: Then and Now," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 173-194, Summer.
    2. A. C. Pigou, 1917. "The Value of Money," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 32(1), pages 38-65.
    3. Roger E. Backhouse & John Creedy (ed.), 1999. "From Classical Economics to the Theory of the Firm," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1824.
    4. Walter Stewart, 1917. "Social Value and the Theory of Money," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 25(10), pages 984-984.
    5. Malcom Rutherford, 1999. "Institutionalism as "Scientific" Economics," Department Discussion Papers 9901, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
    6. Willard Long Thorp, 1926. "Business Annals," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number thor26-1, June.
    7. Walton H. Hamilton, 1917. "Problems of Economic Instruction," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 25(1), pages 1-1.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hugh Rockoff, 2010. "On the Origins of A Monetary History," Chapters, in: Ross B. Emmett (ed.), The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, chapter 7, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Almeida, Felipe & Cavalieri, Marco, 2020. "Understanding Clarence Ayres’s criticism to an emerging mainstream and birthing institutionalism through the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate," OSF Preprints 95jek, Center for Open Science.
    3. Almeida, Felipe & Cavalieri, Marco, 2020. "Understanding Clarence Ayres’s criticism to an emerging mainstream and birthing institutionalism through the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate," OSF Preprints 95jek_v1, Center for Open Science.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gani, Azmat & Scrimgeour, Frank, 2014. "Modeling governance and water pollution using the institutional ecological economic framework," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 363-372.
    2. Dallas S. Batten & Daniel L. Thornton, 1985. "Weighted monetary aggregates as intermediate targets," Working Papers 1985-010, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    3. Gianni Amisano & Roberta Colavecchio, 2025. "Monetary aggregates and inflation: A new view on an old relationship," BCL working papers 195, Central Bank of Luxembourg.
    4. Miguel A. Duran, 2007. "Mathematical Needs and Economic Interpretations," Contributions to Political Economy, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 26(1), pages 1-16.
    5. Jack High, 2011. "Dr. Anderson and the Austrians: Price formation as a cumulative process," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 24(2), pages 199-211, June.
    6. Valentinov, Vladislav, 2023. "Stakeholder theory: Toward a classical institutional economics perspective," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 188(1), pages 75-88.
    7. repec:fip:fedrer:y:1984:i:sep/oct:p:13-22:n:v.70no.5 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Mauricio G. Villena & Marcelo J. Villena, 2004. "Evolutionary Game Theory and Thorstein Veblen’s Evolutionary Economics: Is EGT Veblenian?," Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(3), pages 585-610, September.
    9. Kenneth L. Sokoloff, 1986. "Productivity Growth in Manufacturing during Early Industrialization: Evidence from the American Northeast, 1820-1860," NBER Chapters, in: Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, pages 679-736, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Arthur F. Burns, 1969. "The Nature and Causes of Business Cycles," NBER Chapters, in: The Business Cycle in a Changing World, pages 3-53, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Tamas Dusek, 2013. "Two modes of spatial economy models: Thünen and Krugman," ERSA conference papers ersa13p828, European Regional Science Association.
    12. Scharnagl, Michael, 1996. "Monetary aggregates with special reference to structural changes in the financial markets," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 1996,02e, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    13. Elias Khalil, 1999. "Institutions, Naturalism and Evolution," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(1), pages 61-81.
    14. Tamila Arnania-Kepuladze, 2014. "Institutions: Uncertainty In Definition Of The Term. A Brief Look At The History: 1890-1930," Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, Institute of Economic Research, vol. 9(4), pages 79-102, December.
    15. Walter Eltis, 2004. "Emma Rothschild on economic sentiments: and the true Adam Smith," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(1), pages 147-159.
    16. Dimitrios Zikos, 2020. "Revisiting the Role of Institutions in Transformative Contexts: Institutional Change and Conflicts," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(21), pages 1-20, October.
    17. Fontana, Magda, 2010. "Can neoclassical economics handle complexity? The fallacy of the oil spot dynamic," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 584-596, December.
    18. Michael Paul Kramer & Linda Bitsch & Jon Hanf, 2021. "Blockchain and Its Impacts on Agri-Food Supply Chain Network Management," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-22, February.
    19. Joseph H. Davis, 2005. "An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S. Business Cycles since the 1790's," NBER Working Papers 11157, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Roger Backhouse, 2004. "History of economics, economics and economic history in Britain, 1824 - 2000," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(1), pages 107-127.
    21. Olivier Darné & Amélie Charles & Claude Diebolt, 2014. "A revision of the US business-cycles chronology 1790-1928," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 34(1), pages 234-244.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B3 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vic:vicddp:0104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kali Moon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/devicca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.