MIT and the Transformation of American Economics seeks to remedy the historians’ neglect of the influential and luminary economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The department, bolstered by an influx of innovative young scholars, was one of the most distinguished research economics departments in North America by the late 1950s. In another decade it would become the most highly regarded economics department in the world. This volume documents the history of this process and the ways in which MIT’s rise to prominence coincided with the remarkable transformation of American economics in the postwar period. Many developments influenced this history: the Keynesian revolution, the emergent technical nature of economics, the Cold War, the international hold of American economics, the GI Bill, and MIT’s openness to Jewish economists.
