Editor's Introduction - reviews unorthodox styles of analysis presented in October 2002 issue

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 2002  

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I have already mentioned the piece by Mathew Forstater that explains how the AJES got its mission statement in 1941. Forstater is an expert on Adolphe Lowe and I am delighted that he took up the question I posed and provided an answer.

Next, Professor M. Neil Browne explains why it is difficult to make friends and build trust when participating in the basic impersonal exchanges of the modern market system. This is an important theme among economic sociologists, who draw a sharp distinction between what forms of human bonding are at all possible in market and non-market settings.

In Professor Brenda Spotton Visano's survey piece on "financial manias and panics," she skillfully demonstrates how various psychological and sociological insights can be recruited to help illuminate the now familiar boom-bust sequences that constitute financial crises.

Corruption is a wonderful topic for joint venturing among economists and sociologists. In its extreme form, it leads to the type of crony capitalism that now plagues much of Southeast Asia and central and eastern Europe. As Dr. Johann Graf Lambsdorff explains in his piece, efforts to make corruption more predictable (or less unpredictable!) will simply perpetuate and encourage it. Lambsdorff proposes some novel statistical tests in support of his view.

Finally, Professor Richard J. Cebula offers us a constructive note on a paper that appeared in volume 60 of this journal. A hook note and a film note complete this issue.

I am happy to announce that this year's annual supplement of the AJES (volume 61:5) is written by Christopher K. Ryan, entitled "Harry Gunnison Brown: An Orthodox Economist and His Contributions," and will be published in December. Brown was born in 1880 and died in 1975. He was part of an important group of American economists that included Herbert J. Davenport, E. R. A. Seligman, J. B. Clark, John Commons, Irving Fisher, Frank A. Fetter, Richard Ely, Jacob Viner, and Frank Knight, but today is the least remembered of this group. Brown's writings had a radical streak, in that he supported land value taxation at a time when the leading economists distanced themselves from Henry George's ideas and the possibility of a Georgist tradition in economics. The Ryan book is an important and useful contribution to this journal's current efforts to appreciate the historical developments of social science in the 20th century and get away from the sloganeering that I identify with dismissing whole bodies of thought with labels such as "neoclassical economics" or "orthodox economics" without first examining their substance and content. This supplement, like the previous two that all subscribers received in 2000 and 2001, fits under the thematic label of Studies in Economic Reform and Social Justice.

References

Granovetter, Mark, and Richard Swedberg. (2001). The Sociology of Economic Life Boulder, CC: Westview Press.

Lissner, Will. (2001). "On the Origins of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology: its Purposes and Objectives." American Journal of Economic and Sociology 60(2): 423-34.