The American Tradition in Economics

1976 was a double bicentennial year for American economists. On the one hand, it was the bicentennial year of the establishment of the United States of America as an independent, self‐governing country — an event that in recent years has become far more of a commonplace occurrence than it was in those revolutionary days two centuries ago. On the other hand it was the bicentennial of the publication of the first volume of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the book that launched our discipline and gave it much of its pedagogic content and structure, at least until the Keynesian Revolution introduced the familiar textbook division between micro‐economics and macro‐economics. (1776, incidentally, was also the year of publication of Bentham's A Fragment on Government and Turgot's Six Edicts; not to speak of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a monumental scholarly work that probably should have received much more serious attention in the time of American bicentennary self‐congratulation and hoopla than it did.) The coincidence of the bicentennary of economics and of the United States naturally suggests combination of the two, in a discussion of what, if anything, are the distinctive and distinguishing characteristics of the American tradition in economics.