ABSTRACT

John R. Commons died in 1945 and Wesley Mitchell in 1948. The baton of institutionalist leadership passed to the energetic and charismatic Clarence Ayres. As a broad and diverse movement, American institutionalism continued to have some impact in the postwar period (Yonay, 1998). At least thirteen institutionalists or institutionalist sympathizers have been Presidents of the American Economic Association since the Second World War: Paul Douglas (1947), Frank Knight (1950), Calvin B. Hoover (1953), Simon Kuznets (1954), Edwin E. Witte (1956), Morris Copeland (1957), George W. Stocking (1958), Arthur F. Burns (1959), Joseph Spengler (1965), Kenneth Boulding (1968), John Kenneth Galbraith (1972), Robert A. Gordon (1975) and Charles Kindleberger (1985). But the majority of these elections were before 1960. A measure of the rise and decline of American institutional economics is the number of citations in each decade to works by Thorstein Veblen, as shown in Table 18.1.