Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics (review)

If there is one method that economists are reluctant to embrace, it is that of biography. Biographies are so often about the individual, the unique, and the subjective. Biographies are about investigation without much prospect for quantitative replication. Economists, the most quantitative of the social scientists, feel that by doing biography they give up the part of their discipline that makes them most scientific.

If biography is suspect, autobiography is a tougher sell yet. In autobiography the “researcher” is observing himself or herself and reporting the results to the world at large. What could be less objective and less reliable?

Yet both biography and autobiography endure, including among economists. The question is then to figure out what economists might learn from biography and how biography might fit into the method of economics.

To the rescue come E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, the two editors of the new volume Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics, published by Duke University Press. This excellent volume collects essays, mostly by historians of thought, on the interrelationship between economists and biography, with a focus on the twentieth century. It turns out the relationship has been a fruitful one, and in all three regards: economists doing biography (of economic figures), economists as the subject of biography, and economists doing autobiography.

Oddly, the foundational principles of economics sound, at least at first blush, like they might be sympathetic to biography. At least since the nineteenth century, economists have promoted the idea of “methodological individualism,” namely the notion that economic outcomes can and should be explained by relating them back to the plans and preferences of individual human beings. Yet methodological individualism often seems like a bad description of what economists actually do. When economists work with data sets, they usually treat individuals as belonging to groups. When economists do “economic theory,” they usually relate behavior to mathematically modeled entities called “individuals” rather than to individuals in the live, human sense, as you might find in Webster’s dictionary. If you want true methodological individualism, you are most likely to find it in the field of business history, or perhaps in the history of economic thought, where the researcher puzzles out what an actual individual was thinking or writing and why.

I think of the biographer as standing up and demanding that economists take their own method seriously. Surely the economist should at some point be required to explain something in the life of an actual human being. That is far from the practices of current graduate education in economics, but is it so unreasonable? If the resulting path is strewn with complications and methodological hazards, maybe the fault lies in the difficulty of economic explanation and not in the practice of biography per se. An extreme view, with which I flirt, is that economics ought to be the handmaiden of biography. Economics is useful precisely insofar as it helps us understand individual lives, and it should be put to this test as frequently as possible.

If you are interested in these questions and more, you will find the volume under consideration highly worthwhile. I found two-thirds of the collected essays insightful or useful and the other one-third “OK”; that is a relatively high hit rate for an edited volume. In addition to the broad methodological questions that suffuse the volume, the particular topics include Roger Backhouse on vignettes and short biographies; Robert Dimand on heroes, villains, and straw men in biographical narratives; William Coleman on group lives; and Ross Emmett on the oral history of the Chicago School of Economics. The particular economists covered include John Maynard Keynes, François Quesney, Harry Johnson, and L. Albert Hahn. Robert Leonard offers an imaginative reconstruction of what an Oskar Morganstern autobiography might have looked like.

Famous economists, of course, have at times been active in biography. Keynes’s...