Previous Newsletter Issues

Published by EH.NET (November 2010)

Uskali Mäki, editor, The Methodology of Positive Economics: Reflections on the Milton Friedman Legacy.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xviii + 363 pp. $48 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-68686-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Julian Reiss, Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University.

Friedman’s 1953 essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” is undoubtedly one of the -- or perhaps the -- most influential and most widely and hotly debated papers on economic methodology. What economic methodologist wouldn’t dream of having more than 2,500 citations in Google Scholar for writing “the only essay on methodology that a large number, perhaps majority, of...

Published by EH.NET (November 2010)

Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, editors, The History of the Social Sciences since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x + 256 pp. $26 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-71776-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Philip Mirowski, Department of Economics and Policy Studies, University of Notre Dame.

This is a collection admirable in its motives but frustrating in its execution. Everyone will have their own objections to what they believe is left out in such a short book, so I will strive to avoid the obvious, and instead ask: is this an attempt to mobilize contributions toward a history of something that lacks a coherent center, and therefore any plausible narrative...

Published by EH.NET (November 2010)

David R. Green, Pauper Capital: London and the Poor Law, 1790-1870.  Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.  xviii + 279 pp. $115 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-7546-3008-1.

Reviewed for EH.Net by George R. Boyer, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.

Recent decades have witnessed a large amount of research on the English Poor Law at the local level.  Little of this research has been devoted to London, largely because of the “peculiar” nature of poverty and pauperism in the metropolis.  Historian Steven King contends that London’s poverty problem was “so unlike that even in other major cities that we must regard it as something of an oddity” (...

Published by EH.NET (November 2010)

Robert P. Rogers, An Economic History of the American Steel Industry. New York: Routledge, 2009. xiii + 210 pp. $130 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-77760-5.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Tomas Nonnenmacher, Department of Economics, Allegheny College.

Robert Rogers, Associate Professor of Economics at Ashland University, has written a concise economic history of the steel industry in the United States, covering the period from 1830 to the present in roughly 200 pages. A short book of this sort needs a focus, and Rogers provides one by breaking the industry’s history into nine periods and applying Michael Porter’s taxonomy for studying an industry to each period. Each chapter covers...