A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America - Couverture rigide

Bernstein, Michael Alan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0691042926 ISBN 13 : 9780691042923

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 2001

Synopsis

The 20th-century saga of the economics profession in America is the story of how a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations" became imbued with immense public prestige and finally, a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of "free market" virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail, Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his worik also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash agains federal initiatives

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Michael A. Bernstein is Professor of History and Associated Faculty-Member in Economics at the University of California. San Diego. He is the author of The Great Depression Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939, and coeditor of Understanding American Economic Decline.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0691042926
• ISBN 13: 9780691042923
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 376
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible