Economics and psychology: Lessons for our own day from the early twentieth century

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Special thanks to Michael Mandler and Amartya Sen for extensive discussions of and com-ments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Gary Becker, Stephen Marglin, Sendhil Mullainathan, Sadek Wahba, participants at the Kress Seminar on the History of Economic Thought and the Political Economy Seminar at Harvard University, and three anonymous referees, for their helpful comments. This paper builds on an earlier, widely circulated paper entitled “Rational Choice in Economics and Psychology: The Historical Roots of a Paradoxical Debate,” written at the University of Chicago under the invaluable guidance of William Goldstein (Psychology) and Gary Becker (Economics). The claims in that paper have been revised significantly here as a result of a more thorough analysis of the early literature. This article is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Any opinions expressed below are, of course, solely those of the author.