Does anyone know if there are any economic treatises published by Chicago School (or “Chicago style”) economists? I promise I’m not jumping ship from Mises, it’s just interesting to see how other schools of thought think.
Thanks!
As far as I know the Chicago School are not really in the business of writing “treatises.” Going back Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit might be the closest, though it largely represents the part of the doctrines of the older Chicago School that the the Austrians wouldn’t have a problem with.There are a lot of textbooks that are written from a roughly modern “Chicago” perspective, e.g. Williamson’s Macroeconomics. I imagine Fischer Black’s Exploring General Equilibrium might make for an interesting read too.
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
Risk, Uncertainty and Profit by Frank Knight
I don’t know if this is quite Chicago enough for you, but George Reisman’s Capitalism is an attempt to integrate Austrian insights into what’s often called “mainstream” economics. To be honest I haven’t read the whole thing (it’s like 1000 pages of 2 column, 8 font print!), but the parts I’ve read I thoroughly enjoyed. All I know is it can’t totally be called an “Austrian” work, due to his attempt to bridge that gap. Sorry, wish I could be more specific, but it’s been a while.
Another one who comes to mind is Sowell, though I’m not sure he’s written a treatise, per se. He seems to generally write popular econ books.
friedman/schwartz’s monetary history probabaly counts as a treatise. but really, treatises have been out of fashion for a good half century now.
im no expert on the chicago school but i think if you want to appreciate chicago, dig into its approach to price theory. these guys were heavy on using micro to understand the real world. and not just traditional economic topics. for example, gary becker applied micro to understanding discremenation, crime, families etc. aaron director used to understand the economics of the law.
david friedman’s textbook does a good job of illustrating what i would guess is chicago price theory:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC.html
if you are interested.
Student, I was thinking it would not be worth listing either of the Friedman’s price theory textbooks, since no credible distinction can really be made between “Chicago” price theory and standard price theory aside of the fact the former may have been written by someone with a vague connection to the University of Chicago. Would you agree"?
I don’t know if this is quite Chicago enough for you, but George Reisman’s Capitalism is an attempt to integrate Austrian insights into what’s often called “mainstream” economics.
I don’t think that was Reisman’s intended purpose. His intention was to re-integrate portions of classical theory, which he believed to have been discarded, into Austrian theory. I don’t think any of Reisman’s treatise shares anything in common with any modern monetarist theory, including price theory.
I own Friedman’s textbook Price Theory, and I agree it’s a pretty good intermediate look at mainstream microeconomic price theory. I originally bought it to see if it discussed the role of prices in economic coordination, but it mostly deals with prices in the same way you’re tought in your undergrad studies.
Well, my university library had a copy of George Stigler’s The Theory of Price, so I picked that up.
abskebabs,
i guess it depends on what you mean by credible distinction. Is there anything you will find in friedman or another “chicago” style undergrad textbook that explictly contradicts another undergrad textbook? i don’t think so. but i think there is more of an emphasis on application in friedman than most other textbooks (at least the ones i’ve used).
i have also read that chicago put much less emphasis on general equilibrium (or at least it used to). it isn’t mentioned at all in friedman’s textbook. by contrast my intermediate class spent about 1 day or so on this topic. and the environmental econ course I took a few years back was almost exclusively general equilibrium for the first 4 weeks.
oh or a better comparison. my prof in intermediate international trade actually went to chicago and we never used general eqilibrium analysis in that class. by contrast, krugman’s international econ textbook starts from that point.
but again, these are all just my impressions. i’ve never been to chicago (even to visit). so i could be all wrong.
Hmmm.. That’s an interesting point. I think you’d probably be correct to say that the Chicago School has always had more of a “Marshallian” character to it, especially in the past, at least in terms of emphasis. I guess that’s ironic considering the role they played in the promotion of the perfect competition model in the 1920s, which despite the fact it could and was developed in a Marshallian framework, arguably was quite far from Marshall’s own conception of competition[Cf. the works of GB Richardson and Frank Machovec on Perfect Competition for more info along these lines]. Modern freshwater macro seems to me to be pretty General Equilibrium based too…
Also, with regards to Stigler’s Theory of Price, I’ve actually wanted to get my hands on that book for a little while. Rothbard credits him for a proper derivation of the Law of Returns, so it would be nice to read, especially given that I’ve found from the professors and tetbooks I’ve encountered so far seem to display an incorrect and incomplete understanding of this law and its roots.
“His intention was to re-integrate portions of classical theory, which he believed to have been discarded, into Austrian theory.”
Fair enough. I think that’s a more precise version of what I was trying to say. Basically my point was that it’s not a strictly Misesian book, and perhaps a defining characteristic of it is that there are elements of classical econ in. For somebody looking to branch out a bit and see what else is out there, maybe it’d be a good place to start.
“i have also read that chicago put much less emphasis on general equilibrium (or at least it used to). it isn’t mentioned at all in friedman’s textbook.”
I can’t speak to my father’s Price Theory, but if you are referring to mine I suggest looking at Chapter 8:
David,
My bad. I was actually thinking of both your and Milton Friedman’s textbooks since absk mentioned both but I can see I should have went back and double checked (its been 6 years since i took intermediate micro and your textbook really helped me out back then but my memory is obviously a little fuzzy on how your book differed from the one we used in class). No offense intended!
It looks like some of Milton Friedman’s textbook (which i guess was technically a graduate textbook back in the day but seems less technical than those used today) is also partially available online through Google books and I did find this in the introduction:
“One artifact of Friedman’s Marshallian bent was that he paid scant attention to general equilibrium theory…at a time when the Walrasian approach was in its asendancy.”
Modern freshwater macro seems to me to be pretty General Equilibrium based too…
absk, I figure that’s probably true. I just checked out the univ of chicago’s website. here is what it says about its second graduate course in price theory.
The second half of the course will be devoted to the Walrasian model of general competitive equilibrium as developed by Arrow and Debreu. This will begin with a brief development of the consumer and producer theories, followed by the welfare theorems connecting equilibria and optima and a treatment of the classical existence of equilibrium theorem. The core of an economy, a limit theorem relating the core to the set of competitive equilibria, and models in which agents are small relative to the market will also be considered. Finally we will study general equilibrium under some alternative assumptions; such as, informational asymmetries and rational expectations equilibrium, public goods and Lindahl equilibrium, financial general equilibrium and asset pricing. (=LAWS 43621)