Sharpening Tools in the Workshop: The Workshop System and the Chicago School's Success

Abstract

In the post-war period, the economics department at the University of Chicago consciously designed an institutional infrastructure to support the application of the analytical tools of price theory, monetary theory and econometrics to the study of competitive markets. Drawing upon a particular conception of what social scientific work could be, the teaching and research missions of the department for both students and faculty were merged by the construction of the workshop model. The creation and evolution of the workshops, and their relationship to the curricular model of graduate education, in the department will be traced from their origins in the 1940s to the late 1970s (the history of the workshops in the business and law schools is different, and will only be briefly mentioned). The workshop model was integral to the success of the Chicago School of Economics.

The essay is now available in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America's Most Powerful Economics Program, edited by Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski and Thomas Stapleford. Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 93-115.

Keywords: Chicago School of Economics, University of Chicago, T.W. Schultz, Milton Friedman, workshop model, history of economics, Chicago economics, history of American economics

JEL Classification: A14, B20, B21, B22, B23, B25