Morgan, Mary S. The history of econometric ideas. (English) Zbl 0765.01005 Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press,. xv, 296 p. (1990). Econometrics has become a well established field with a high degree of mathematical sophistication now. However, there is some discontent with the fact that there is an increasing gap between the development of methods and theory on the one hand, and the real needs of economic data analysis on the other hand. For this reason many econometricians recently show a growing interest in the main paradigms and ideas which have led to modern econometrics.This book is an excellent presentation of main ideas in the history of econometrics. It consists of three parts.Part I is entitled “Business cycles”. Its major contents are as follows: A presentation of the sunspot and Venus theories of the business cycle, as developed by Jevons and Moore in the second part of the last century and in the early twentieth century. This is an extremely interesting part of the history of early time series analysis and is connected with the use of the periodogram. The next chapter is concerned with measuring and representing business cycles with an emphasis on the nontheoretical (purely empirical) description of business cycles, with statistical methods, in particular with work of Mitchell and Pearson in the twenties and thirties of our century. The third chapter is on random- shock theories for business cycles, in particular on the work of Slutzky and Yule in this context. The last part is on Tinbergen and modern macro- dynamic modelbuilding. The interesting and still relevant discussion between Tinbergen and Keynes on the usefulness and limitation of the econometric approach is described in detail.Part II of the book is concerned with demand analysis. A description of the problems of statistical measurement of demand curves, based on economic theory is given. In demand analysis, perhaps for the first time, the problem of identifiability of parameters occured and this is described in detail in this part.Part III deals with mathematical and statistical concepts and methods in econometrics. This part is perhaps the most interesting one from the point of view “what can we learn from history?” for our future work. This part consists of two chapters. Its first chapter is concerned with errors-in-variables models. Errors-in-variables problems had received great attention in the thirties of our century. Later, partly also because of the great mathematical complexity of the problem, these kind of models received less attention. Some of the readers might ask whether it is justified to give this topic such a weight in the book. However, in the reviewer’s opinion, this is legitimate because of the great potential practical importance of the field. The second chapter of Part III is concerned with the introduction of the stochastic paradigm in econometrics by Haavelmo. With the use of stochastic models, econometric analysis became part of inferential statistics. The discussion of these problems in the book is also of great interest, since some econometricians feel that despite of its great success, the stochastic analysis is now overdone in econometrics.Summarizing I have to say that this is an excellent book which should be read by every econometrician. In particular in the present state of econometrics the history of econometric ideas is especially interesting, because of the increasing interest in new ideas and paradigms. Reviewer: M.Deistler Cited in 34 Documents MSC: 01A55 History of mathematics in the 19th century 01A60 History of mathematics in the 20th century 62P20 Applications of statistics to economics 62M10 Time series, auto-correlation, regression, etc. in statistics (GARCH) Keywords:business cycles; Jevons; Moore; time series analysis; random-shock theories; Slutzky; Yule; Tinbergen; macro-dynamic modelbuilding; Keynes; demand analysis; stochastic paradigm; Haavelmo; inferential statistics PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{M. S. Morgan}, The history of econometric ideas. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press (1990; Zbl 0765.01005)