''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'' (2018), 3rd ed., is a twenty-volume reference work on
economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics anal ...
published by
Palgrave Macmillan. It contains around 3,000 entries, including many classic essays from the original Inglis Palgrave Dictionary, and a significant increase in new entries from the previous editions by the most prominent economists in the field, among them 36 winners of the
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Articles are classified according to ''
Journal of Economic Literature''
(''JEL'') classification codes.
''The New Palgrave'' is also available in a
hyperlinked online version. Online content is added to the 2018 edition, and a 4th edition under the editorship of
J. Barkley Rosser Jr., Esteban Pérez Caldentey, and Matías Vernengo will be published in the future. The first edition was titled ''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'' (1987), was and edited by
John Eatwell,
Murray Milgate, and
Peter Newman, as a way of recovering the legacy of Inglis Palgrave famous dictionary. It was published in four volumes, while the second edition was under the direction of
Steven N. Durlauf and
Lawrence E. Blume and was published in eight volumes.
Both are discussed in a section below.
Access to full-text articles (for all editions and post-2018 updates) are available online by subscription, whether of an organization, a person, or a person through an organization.
''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics''
''The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'' (1987) is the title of the first ''New Palgrave'' edition. It is a four-volume reference edited by
John Eatwell,
Murray Milgate, and
Peter Newman. It has 4,000 pages of entries, including 1,300 subject entries (with 4,000 cross-references), and 655 biographies. There were 927 contributors, including 13
Nobel Laureates in Economics at the time of first publication. It includes about 50 articles from ''Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy'' (1925–1927).
It was roughly twice the length of its predecessor and differed further in excluding most subjects not on economics or closely related to its practice. It was developed as a modern version of the old Inglis Palgrave dictionary, with entries written by prominent economists for a highly specialized public.
Reviews
General remarks
Reviewing the 1987 edition for the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'',
Robert M. Solow concluded that "this is a dictionary only in a very special sense. There are excellent survey articles, in various sizes, on various subjects. But the best of them are written by professionals for professionals." According to Solow, graduate students in economics would find the dictionary useful, but most of the articles would be inaccessible to non-economists, even undergraduate students of the liberal arts. For economists, however, the dictionary provided many excellent overviews of contemporary research.
[Robert M. Solow](_blank)
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' "The Wide, Wide World of Wealth", March 28, 1998 In response, editor confirmed that the articles were written for an audience of
professional
A professional is a member of a profession or any person who works in a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and sk ...
economists, and so neither for the general
reading public nor for
specialist economists.
Mathematics and contemporary economics
According to Milgate, ''New Palgrave'' downplayed mathematics, in comparison to leading economic journals. Only 24% of the columns ''contained'' "any mathematics" (and so required expensive hand-typesetting), while only 25% of the most recent issue of the ''
American Economic Review'' (''AER'') in fact ''lacked'' mathematics, according to Milgate, who averred that the ''AER'' mathematical usage was typical of leading contemporary journals: The ''New Palgrave''s usage of mathematics was the reciprocal of the contemporary profession's. "It must be concluded that the ''New Palgrave'' actually under-represented the mathematical element in modern economics; and under-represented it to a significant degree", wrote .
Commenting on contemporary economics, Solow described technical economics as its essential "
infrastructure":
More advanced mathematics was implicit in some of the articles, many of which were well written and reasonably accessible. Solow recommended the "broad and deep" article on
game theory by
Robert J. Aumann for well-equipped graduate students, along with
John Harsanyi's article on
bargaining theory. The articles on
financial economics
Financial economics, also known as finance, is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on ''both sides'' of a trade". William F. Sharpe"Financia ...
were "written by the best people—
Stephen Ross,
Robert Merton, and others—and they show it"; however, they were too difficult for the average investor. Complimenting the article on
international trade
International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or want of goods or services. (see: World economy)
In most countries, such trade represents a significa ...
, Solow added a ''
caveat lector'': "But God forbid that" a reader without knowledge of economics should try to understand
protectionism
Protectionism, sometimes referred to as trade protectionism, is the economic policy of restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import quotas, and a variety of other government regulation ...
, by consulting the ''New Palgrave''.
In his review,
George Stigler commended the dictionary's non-technical and conceptually rich article on
social choice, which was written by
Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.
In economi ...
, among "numerous" excellent articles. However, Stigler criticized the inclusion of "dozens" of articles in
mathematical economics, which failed to provide intuitive introductions to the problem, how it was solved, and what the solution is: "These articles were written, not for a tolerably competent economist, but exclusively for fellow specialists."
Exclusion of empirical material
Whitaker wrote, "Readers to whom economics is nothing if not a science based on empirical inquiry may be dismayed by the lack of attention to empirical studies and factual matters".
Stigler criticized the ''New Palgrave'' for largely ignoring empirical economics—economic data, summary statistics, and econometric investigations. According to Stigler, the empirical investigation of consumption and production functions has profoundly influenced microeconomic theory, while the empirical investigation of price levels has profoundly influenced monetary economics: The ''New Palgraves neglect of empirical economics also weakened its treatment of economic theory and the history of economic thought. Furthermore, the editors failed to explain their neglect of empirical economics, while they gave large space to treatments of "technical economics", especially
mathematical economics, and faddish topics, wrote Stigler.
"The article on 'Profit and profit theory' does not contain a single number for what profits are or ever have been, in the United States or any other country, or any reference to any source that might provide such a number", wrote
Herbert Stein, who complained "There are articles about elasticities of this or that but no estimate of the elasticity of anything."
Reviewing the critics of the over-emphasis on theoretical and "doctrinal" economics, editor Milgate admitted that the ''New Palgrave'' was flawed by its neglect of empirical economics.
Criticisms of undue weight for heterodox approaches
Robert M. Solow criticized the 1987 edition for slighting
mainstream economics by giving excessive space to the "dissenting fringes within academic economics", namely
Marxist economics as well as
"Austrian persuasion",
Post-Keynesians, and
neo-Ricardian
The neo-Ricardian school is an economic school of thought
that derives from the close reading and interpretation of David Ricardo by Piero Sraffa, and from Sraffa's critique of neoclassical economics as presented in his ''The Production of Comm ...
.
The 1987 dictionary's discussion of
heterodox approaches was also criticized by George Stigler, who complained that these articles were written by sympathetic editors in a partisan manner:
The selection of sympathetic writers ... is in fact a general practice in ''Palgrave II''. Israel Kirzner's essay on the Austrian economists does not hint at the existence of error, misrepresentation of critics, or tasteless attacks upon the German Historical School, and Klaus Henning did little better with Böhm-Bawerk. An ersatz Austrian
is apparently more loyal than the genuine article.
talics added
Stigler complained about the extensive and biased articles on Marxist economics, including "
neo-Ricardian
The neo-Ricardian school is an economic school of thought
that derives from the close reading and interpretation of David Ricardo by Piero Sraffa, and from Sraffa's critique of neoclassical economics as presented in his ''The Production of Comm ...
" economists (who follow
Piero Sraffa): "A nonprofessional reader would never guess from these volumes that economists working in the Marxian-Sraffian tradition represent a small minority of modern economists, and that their writings have virtually no impact upon the professional work of most economists in major English-language universities." Stigler provided a table of articles that were biased by Marxist orthodoxy and criticized some authors by name, especially a "violently pro-Marxist" entry by
C. B. Macpherson.
The 2nd edition (2008)
The General Editors were
Steven N. Durlauf and
Lawrence E. Blume. It added considerably on the previous edition, and maintained the general conception of the dictionary as written for advanced specialists. The list of Nobel laureates increased to 25, and the number of volumes also doubled. Perhaps as a result of already being an established institution there were a considerably smaller number of reviews. Declan Trott argued that the Dictionary is not properly a dictionary or an encyclopedia and that the quality and depth of the entries are very uneven, comparing it with Wikipedia as a source for information on economics.
Earlier editions
R. H. Inglis Palgrave's ''Dictionary of Political Economy'' (1894–1899), 3 v., was the forerunner of ''The New Palgrave''. The initial contractual agreement between Palgrave and the publisher Macmillan & Co. is dated 1888. Serial installments in 1891–92 had disappointing sales. An appendix was added t
Volume IIIin 1908, so completing publication of the set. The ''Dictionary'' was wide-ranging and sometimes idiosyncratic. It included for example a comprehensive treatment of laws on property and commercial transactions. Professional reaction has been described as generally favorable and unsurprising, "given that almost all economists of any repute had already endorsed the enterprise by agreeing to contribute." Nearly thirty years after the first volume appeared, ''Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy'' (1923–1926), edited by
Henry Higgs, appeared with Palgrave's name added to the title but few changes in structure or contents.
See also
* ''
Concise Encyclopedia of Economics''
*
Economics handbooks
* ''
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences''
*
List of encyclopedias by branch of knowledge
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:New Palgrave
1987 non-fiction books
2008 non-fiction books
Economics books
1987 in economics
Palgrave Macmillan books