Clarence Edwin Ayres was the leading American institutionalist economist in the post-World War II era. His innovative theories concerning the causes and significance of technological change provided the philosophical framework for that school of economics called institutionalism. In his recognition that the critical economic issues of the future would be the realization of the full economic potential of industrial society and the development of the third world, he was at least twenty years ahead of his time. In addition, Ayres's influence as an economics teacher at the University of Texas...

One hundred years after his birth, J. K. Galbraith s The Great Crash 1929 is again on the bestseller lists. And in the current financial and economic tumult, familiar Galbraithian concerns such as the power and dominance of overweening corporations, national and global poverty, and the careless destruction of the natural environment once again loom large in the public consciousness.

Galbraith s contemporaries included such towering intellects as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Milton Friedman, Wassily Leontief, Simon Kuznets, James Meade, Nicolas Kaldor, and Joan Robinson....