Harvard Castle.
How did a quarterly magazine engineer the economic order of the world for 140 years?
Asia Asadpour/Author of the publication.
In the fall of 1886 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the economy wandered like a girl. The prominent thinkers of the time did not have a clear framework for understanding the increasing industrial relations. But among them, Charles Franklin Dunbar, who for years kept the pulse of the business press in publications in Boston before he came to the chair of political economy at Harvard, saw the era of theoretical government and the repetition of the formulas of Adam Smith's book. Emerging capitalism emerged with parallel railroads, huge oil trusts, and wild swings in the financial market, while universities still repeated the abstract categories of past centuries. Therefore, in October 1886, by writing the historical editorial "Reaction in Political Economy", he founded the "Economic Quarterly".
In the decades after World War II, this journal became a source of articles that changed the directions in the entire economy. His first milestone occurred in February 1955; When Herbert Simon published the revolutionary article "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", he broke the concept of the economic man in full rationality and founded the concept of "bounded rationality"; A work that paved the way for the birth of cognitive science and economic psychology and placed his name among the Nobel winners in 1978.
In recent years, among the pioneers and top economic researchers in the world, Iranian economists or other Iranian elites in international academic circles have signed some of the most brilliant studies on the pages of this magazine; The works that became the pillars of applied theory in the world. One of the most prominent of these examples is an article published by Alireza Tehvazasali, a professor at Northwestern University, entitled "Production Shocks and Input Networks: Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake" in issue 134 of "Economic Quarterly" in 2019.
The "Economic Quarter", which entered its 140th year of existence, still maintained its structure. The current publisher is Oxford University Press, but its headquarters have never moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts.