The Tinbergen Legacy

The Tinbergen Legacy

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USD Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Temporarily Out of Stock Online Please check back later for updated availability. Over of Niko Tinbergen's friends, family, colleagues, former students and people who had never met him in person converged at Oxford for what turned out to be a memorable day. To reflect the rather special atmosphere of the conference, we decided to begin this book with Richard Dawkins' opening remarks exactly as he gave them on that day. Welcome to Oxford. For many of you it is welcome back to Oxford. Perhaps even, for some of you, it would be nice to think that it might feel like welcome home to Oxford.

About this book

And it is a great pleasure to welcome so many friends from the Netherlands. Last week, when everything had been settled except final, last minute arrangements, we heard that Lies Tinbergen had died. Obviously we would not have chosen such a time to have this meeting. Product Details Table of Contents. They learn the tools of the trade not necessarily to advise and consult those outside the profession but to impress, entertain, and intimidate fellow academicians with clever refinements and criticisms of the most advanced tools.

When they perform to show off their skills, they do so in front of an academic audience without consideration of the lay audiences. The American graduate students indicated to be troubled by this imposed character of the Academic Professional. Dutch economists do not share these confusions of desired and actual identities.

They do not feel the pressure to conform to a specific character. The reason might be that the Academic Professional still is not the dominant character in Dutch academia. This may change, though. Notably, the program at Tilburg university impresses the importance of operating in the international community; it follows the American approach with many foreign visitors coming through and a large variety of weekly seminars.

Several AIOs expressed a desire to participate in the academic game, and consciously pursue the status of Academic Professional.

The Dutch students who do not want to jump on the American 4. The mood may have changed since the American survey was done. Several outstanding young economists have sought the spotlights in the policy arena and thus may have changed the standards for American graduates. Examples are Larry Summers, now assistant secretary of the Treasury, Paul Krugman who has left an indelible imprint on the public discussion of international trade issues, and Joe Stiglitz who is the current chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

The Researcher Dutch academic training appears to be less restraining, less selective than the American one.

It leaves open more room to students to fill in their own character. As a consequence the characters that make up the Dutch world of economists differ from the ones that Klamer and Colander encountered in the US. One of these is that of the Researcher. This is the economist who does economics for the sake of research.

He is not an Academic Professional because he lacks the commitment of the latter to the academic game; he most likely prefers to work at a research institute rather than a university. As a researcher he is less interested in advancing academic knowledge and techniques than in applying existing knowledge and techniques to real world problems. If compromises are needed to get results, the Researcher is willing to go where the Academic purist would refuse to tread. It is no surprise therefore that the Researcher prefers to share his research with fellow researchers rather than with Academic Professionals.

His objective is to do research that is relevant for decision making in policy and, possibly, business but as a Researcher he is reluctant to 'sell' his findings to the possible users.

Nikolaas Tinbergen

That task he prefers to leave to others. Insofar as we can speak of the CPB economist, he loves to do research, likes to be a scientist but he does not see himself to be quite up to speed, insists on the applicability of his research, is willing to make concessions when needed, and derives satisfaction from seeing the influence of his work on the policy process.

The Academic Professional, in contrast, is foremost interested in the approval and appreciation of fellow academics. Researchers like to publish in academic journals, but an academic publication is no must for them; it is to an Academic Professional. The character of the Researcher continues to inspire Dutch economists: 28 percent of the Dutch graduates professed their desire to be one. This is the economist who seeks satisfaction and recognition as an economist in the policy arena. According to this character enlightenment of the policy process with the insights of scientific economics is what economics is all about.

It is the character of Tinbergen and so many other Dutch economists who have participated, and continue to do so, in political processes in their quality as economics professor. Policy advisors are not the neutral technical experts as they are portrayed by the outside world but they also have their self-serving aims, viz.

And if that means that they have to make exaggerated claims or employ the Ricardian Vice, so be it.

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Policy advisers are in the persuasion business and their value stems primarily from getting their 5. The absence of the Researcher in the American study may be due to the limited sample of economists for that study. Even so, we found more readiness of Dutch graduate students to become Researcher than Klamer and Colander detected among the American students.

To put this in the civil servants' lingo: they want to set the political agenda. This character exists in the US too, of course.

Passar bra ihop

Just think of the long line of respected and reputable academic economists who worked on the Council of Economic Advisors and research departments of Federal Reserve Banks especially the Fed in Minneapolis. In contradistinction to the Dutch Political Activist, the American one usually has to be on leave from academia to perform as one, and when he stays academic, risks his academic stature.

He does not hide his disdain for such a character. Dutch economists who venture into the policy arena are not free from suspicions on the part of their academic colleagues but it will be relatively easy to maintain their position in academic life. John Maynard Keynes 58 1. Jan Tinbergen 16 1. Jan Tinbergen 2. Kenneth J. Arrow 35 2. John Maynard Keynes 15 2. John Maynard Keynes 3. Paul A. Samuelson 26 3.

Paul Krugman 12 3. John Kenneth Galbraith 35 4.

Karl Marx 23 4. Gary S. Becker 8 Joseph Schumpeter 35 5. Adam Smith 18 Adam Smith 8 5. Economists who value the work and attitude of one economist so highly cannot be but moved and affected by the values of that same economist. Jan Tinbergen is the most respected economist in the Netherlands.

This finding together with the motivations that Dutch economists give for their choice helps to unravel the character of the Dutch economist. This ability 7. We hasten to add that the dominance of one economist in a European country is not a unique phenomenon. The influence of Nobel Laureate Ragnar Frisch in Norway is remarkably similar to the influence of Tinbergen in the Netherlands.

More than anyone else, however, Jan Tinbergen stands model for all these economists with his reputation for combining theoretical and practical skills. Tinbergen started off as a Researcher in his work for the United Nations, was an academic with positions at universities in Amsterdam and in Rotterdam, and became active in the policy world as director of the Central Planning Bureau, and later in international development organizations.

Especially important is his involvement with the Central Planning Bureau which, as we have seen, was instrumental in developing post-war Dutch economic thought. Arguably, the CPB is his most important legacy to the world of Dutch economists. The CPB influence on Dutch academia was for a long time strong due to personal connections: researchers who started their career at the CPB often moved to academia where they essentially taught CPB-economics, that is, large-scale Keynesian macroeconometric modeling.

The econometric modeling critique by Robert Lucas did not have a major effect on the CPB approach, but in hindsight we may see it as a beginning of the fading of the reputation of the CPB in the Dutch academic world. Table 6: Voting behaviour of Dutch economists versus Dutch citizens Party Percentage votes Percentage votes Percentage votes Economists total graduates national election 1. Labour party PvdA Conservatives VVD Democrats D66 Christian Democrats CDA Green Left Groen Links 7. Other parties 4.

To see how strong the example of Tinbergen still is, we investigated to which extent the beliefs of Dutch economists reflect the values and scientific principles of Tinbergen.

The Tinbergen Legacy by M.S. Dawkins

Musing on his professional experiences Tinbergen , p. Similar values and preferences showed up in conversations with CPB-researchers. They project themselves as the unbiased applied scientists in search of the truth; the same stance we found in discussions with the economists of the ministries and the Central Bank.

As one CPB-researcher formulated it "I think we use models as a medium to process information from numerous sources and to make that information consistent. The ambition is not to produce an optimal forecast. One of our goals is to be useful for the political debate, which means that we have to use the assumptions used by policy makers, even though we sometimes think that they're not tenable. Dutch economists still value the use of wage-price controls and, contrary to what one would expect, do not think that the economic power of unions should be curtailed see Table 1.

Among the total population of Dutch economist this skill ranked highest, to be followed by mathematical skills see Table 2. US graduates do not value empirical research as high as the Dutch. The preference for empirical work is instilled on every Dutch economics student by their teachers, who refer to the work by the Central Planning Bureau and the scientific achievements made by Dutch econometricians like Theil, Cramer and Magnus see Van Dalen, The desire to work in interdisciplinary teams sheds light on the puzzling statistic mentioned earlier: the Dutch do not think that economics is the Queen of the Social Sciences.

In discussions with graduate students the desire to work in other scientific disciplines came up; the generally respected economists like Rick van der Ploeg and Jan Pen expressed the same desire. He himself once motivated his interest as follows: "I was interested in the problem of unemployment, the problem of poverty generally, and being a socialist and a member of the Socialist Party, I felt that I could be more useful as an economist than as a physicist.

The older generation, however, is most outspoken in their endorsement. Dutch economists carry on the leftist leanings of Tinbergen, who always has been a member of the Dutch socialist party the PvdA. If we add to the number of votes allocated to more or less left wing parties such as the Green Left and the Democrats D66 the median Dutch economist can be typified as left wing.

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