The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics arrives in twenty volumes and contains around three thousand entries written by the most prominent economists in the field, including thirty-six winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. That is an extraordinary gathering of expertise under one roof. But the moment you open it, you encounter a puzzle. Robert M. Solow, himself a Nobel laureate, reviewed the original 1987 edition for the New York Times and reached a startling verdict: this is a dictionary, he wrote, only in a very special sense. What does it mean for a reference work to be a dictionary only in a very special sense? Who actually reads it, and who is left out? And how did a nineteenth-century project by one R. H. Inglis Palgrave eventually grow into a twenty-first-century reference work still being revised today, with a fourth edition due in 2027?

• 2. Inglis Palgrave's Legacy

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  R. H. Inglis Palgrave signed a contractual agreement with the publisher Macmillan and Co. in 1888 to produce what would become the Dictionary of Political Economy. Serial installments appeared in 1891-92 but found disappointing sales. Palgrave's dictionary eventually ran to three volumes, published across the years 1894-1899, and an appendix was added to Volume III in 1908 to complete the set.

  The work was wide-ranging and sometimes idiosyncratic. It included, for example, a comprehensive treatment of laws on property and commercial transactions, ranging well beyond what later economists would consider the field's proper boundary. Professional reaction was described as generally favorable, though observers noted it was perhaps unsurprising that reception was warm, 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 was revised as a second edition, published in 1923-1926 and edited by Henry Higgs. Palgrave's name was added to the title, but there were few structural changes or new contents. That comparative inertia would make the gap between the Higgs revision and the eventual New Palgrave of 1987 feel all the more dramatic.

• 3. The 1987 Edition

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  John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman edited the first New Palgrave, published in 1987, deliberately framing the project as a recovery of Inglis Palgrave's legacy for a modern audience. The result ran to four volumes and four thousand pages. It contained 1,300 subject entries with four thousand cross-references, 655 biographies, and contributions from 927 writers, among them thirteen Nobel Laureates in Economics at the time of publication.

  About fifty articles were carried over from the Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, the 1925-1927 edition. The new dictionary was roughly twice the length of its predecessor, and it made a deliberate choice to exclude most subjects not directly in economics or closely related to its practice. Where Palgrave's original had been wide-ranging, the New Palgrave sharpened its focus on a specialized professional readership.

  Milgate confirmed that intent explicitly. The articles were written for professional economists, not for the general reading public, and not even for specialist economists outside the field. Solow put the consequence plainly: graduate students in economics would find the dictionary useful, but most articles would be inaccessible to non-economists, including undergraduate students of the liberal arts.

• 4. Mathematics and Exclusion

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  Milgate pointed to a striking internal contradiction in the 1987 edition. Only 24% of the columns in the New Palgrave contained any mathematics, which required expensive hand-typesetting. At the same time, only 25% of the most recent issue of the American Economic Review lacked mathematics. The New Palgrave's usage of mathematics, Milgate concluded, was the reciprocal of the contemporary profession's.

  Solow described technical economics as the essential infrastructure of the entire discipline. He quoted a passage he found instructive in the fate of Palgrave's original dictionary: economics, he argued, had ceased to be fit conversation for ladies and gentlemen and had become a technical subject like any other, attracting people more interested in technique than in the subject itself. The technical core, he insisted, was indispensable for political economy, so a reader consulting the New Palgrave for enlightenment about the contemporary world would be led to technical economics, to history, or to nothing at all.

  George Stigler, writing his own review, criticized the dictionary for a different kind of mathematical failure. He complained that dozens of articles in mathematical economics failed to offer intuitive introductions to the problem, how it was solved, and what the solution was. Those articles were written, in his view, not for a tolerably competent economist but exclusively for fellow specialists. Solow, by contrast, praised what he called the broad and deep article on game theory by Robert J. Aumann as a rewarding read for well-equipped graduate students, alongside John Harsanyi's article on bargaining theory. The articles on financial economics, written by Stephen Ross, Robert Merton, and others, were praised for showing the quality of their authors, though Solow acknowledged they were too difficult for the average investor.

• 5. Empirical Blind Spots

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  Whitaker observed that readers for whom economics is nothing if not a science based on empirical inquiry would be dismayed by the dictionary's lack of attention to empirical studies and factual matters. Stigler pressed the point harder. He argued that the empirical investigation of consumption and production functions had profoundly influenced microeconomic theory, and that the empirical study of price levels had profoundly influenced monetary economics. The New Palgrave's neglect of those traditions weakened not only its treatment of economic theory but also its coverage of the history of economic thought.

  Herbert Stein illustrated the gap with a specific example. The article on profit and profit theory, he wrote, did not contain a single number for what profits are or ever have been, in the United States or any other country, and gave no reference to any source that might provide such a number. Stein added that the dictionary contained articles about elasticities of various kinds but offered no estimate of the elasticity of anything.

  The editors had given large space to mathematical and doctrinal economics while offering no explanation for their neglect of the empirical side. Milgate eventually admitted the flaw. In reviewing criticisms about the over-emphasis on theoretical and doctrinal economics, he conceded that the New Palgrave was flawed by its neglect of empirical economics.

• 6. Contested Political Ground

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  Solow's most pointed criticism was that the 1987 edition slighted mainstream economics by giving excessive space to dissenting fringes within academic economics. He named Marxist economics, the Austrian persuasion, Post-Keynesians, and neo-Ricardians as groups that received coverage disproportionate to their standing in the profession. He compared the effect to a medical dictionary interspersing articles on mainstream orthopedics with articles on osteopathy, written by osteopaths, and leaving it at that.

  Stigler sharpened the charge by pointing to specific authors. Israel Kirzner's essay on the Austrian economists, he argued, gave no hint of error, misrepresentation of critics, or what Stigler called tasteless attacks upon the German Historical School. A nonprofessional reader, Stigler wrote, would never guess from these volumes that economists working in the Marxian-Sraffian tradition represented a small minority of modern economists, with virtually no impact upon professional work in major English-language universities. He provided a table of articles he considered biased by Marxist orthodoxy and singled out by name a C. B. Macpherson entry on individualism as violently pro-Marxist.

  The editors' choice to commission articles on heterodox schools from sympathetic writers was, in Stigler's view, a general practice throughout the edition. Piero Sraffa's neo-Ricardian tradition in particular attracted multiple entries, a concentration Stigler found disproportionate and misleading about the actual state of the discipline.

• 7. Growth and the Third Edition

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  Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume served as general editors for the 2nd edition, published in 2008. The number of volumes doubled from four to eight, the list of Nobel laureates credited grew to twenty-five, and the dictionary added considerably to the previous edition while maintaining the conception of the work as written for advanced specialists. Declan Trott, reviewing that edition, argued that the dictionary was not properly a dictionary or an encyclopedia, and that the quality and depth of entries were very uneven.

  The third edition, published in 2018, expanded the project further into twenty volumes and approximately three thousand entries. It classified all articles according to Journal of Economic Literature classification codes, and articles from all editions became available online by subscription, whether through an individual, an organization, or an individual accessing through an organization's subscription. A hyperlinked online version allows content to be added beyond the print edition.

  A fourth edition is scheduled for 2027, under the editorship of Jayati Ghosh, Esteban Perez Caldentey, and Matias Vernengo. J. Barkley Rosser Jr. had been listed as a co-editor until his death. The project that began with a contractual agreement in 1888 will continue adding new entries and new voices, carrying forward a reference tradition now well into its second century.