The USDA Graduate School was founded in 1921 to provide statistical and economic training to the employees of the Department of Agriculture. The school did not grant degrees, but its graduate courses were accepted for credit by a significant number of universities.

In subsequent years, the activities of the school grew rapidly to provide training in many different subject areas for employees from almost all federal departments. The training in statistics provided by the school was often highly advanced (instructors included Howard Tolley and, later, Edwards Deming), while the economics taught displayed an eclectic mix of standard and institutional economics. Mordecai Ezekiel taught both economics and statistics at the school, and had himself received his statistical training there. Statistics instruction in 1936 and 1937 included seminar series from R.A. Fisher and J. Neyman, and courses on the probability approach to sampling involving Lester Frankel and William Hurwitz became important after 1939. The instruction in economics was noticeably institutionalist in the period of the New Deal. Towards the end of the period considered here, the instruction in economics became narrower and more focused on agricultural economics.

The activities of the school provide a basis for understanding some of the sources of the relative statistical sophistication of agricultural economists and of the statistical work done in government in the interwar period. It is noteworthy than within the USDA Graduate School, and in contrast to the Cowles Commission, statistical sophistication coexisted with an approach to economics that was not predominantly neoclassical. It also provides a light on the place of institutional economics in the training of government economists through the same time span.

Fr. John A. Ryan (1869–1945) was one of the early advocates of minimum wage laws in the United States. The thesis of this paper is that in three respects Fr. Ryan stood apart from other advocates of the minimum wage. First, during the period of his work, economics was developing on the basis of the positivist conception of science. Fr. Ryan’s case for the minimum wage combined economics with “non-scientific” theology and philosophy. Second, most religiously motivated American reformers were Protestants, and their advocacy was grounded in the Protestant Social Gospel movement. This was different from Fr. Ryan’s grounding in the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which themselves were grounded in the Catholic Church’s constant teaching that man is made in the image of God. Third, many reformers were motivated not at all by religion, but by the utilitarian calculus that had become the foundation of the social sciences. Although Fr. Ryan made utilitarian judgments in his analysis, he was not an ethical utilitarian.

The basic principles of Robbins's Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science are still present in most textbooks in economics. We thus face a combined problem of historical and contemporary nature. Robbins's assertion concerning the ethics–economics relationship has two main difficulties. Firstly, the presumption of means–ends analysis, which is oblivious of the ends people seek to promote, is not as neutral as it appears. Robbins chooses to ignore the ends by focusing on cost minimization. This implicitly (though not inherently) suggests another end—wealth, or means, maximization—which by no means can be considered as ethically neutral. Secondly, there is an implicit assumption that whatever the ends people seek to promote, there will always be a coordinated outcome to their actions. As competitive prices are the means to achieve waste minimization (through proper pricing by opportunity costs), the assumed coordination must be that of general equilibrium and, thus, cooperative-based coordination must be excluded.

Everyone has to eat, so agriculturalists must produce enough to feed themselves and the rest of the population. This statement is trivially obvious but making it explicit mattered to the early development of economic thinking. Many important economic writers of the period (Petty, Cantillon, Hutcheson, Hume, Steuart, Mirabeau, Smith, and others) used a specific notion of agricultural surplus of the form: x men can feed y, where y > x. A series of questions about the relation between agriculture and the rest of the economy naturally follows. Will the surplus be produced? How does it reach those who consume it? What are the “superfluous hands” (in Hume’s terms) to do? This paper points out this neglected theme in early economics.

This article fills a gap in the literature by examining the only leading classical economist whose influence on Spain has yet to be studied. In particular, it analyzes the influence John Stuart Mill had on nineteenth-century Spain by showing the impact of his multifaceted work both in scientific philosophy and utilitarian philosophy, and in political and economic theory, as well as in the world of feminism.

The aim of this article is to explore whether there is a relevant impact of the Russian case and of Russian economic thought on the twentieth-century Western debate on economic development. It is argued that things Russian continued to have an impact on this notion, similar to the one we have found for the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russia’s historical experience provided an important standpoint from which to think and rethink the meaning of economic development. As in the previous centuries, Russia’s paradoxical presence—between Europe and Asia, backward but also modern, an “apprentice” who now claimed the position of a teacher—helped to spark new thinking. The resistance of some of her intellectuals and policy makers to accept the certainties of the mainstream of the economic science contributed to raise doubts regarding the validity of Western conceptual frameworks.