Paul, Diane B. 1987. "The Nine Lives of Discredited Data: Old Textbooks Never Die -- They Get Paraphrased." The Sciences (May/June): pp. 26-30. 26: in 1980, after Cyril Burt's fraud had been exposed in the 1970's, text books continued to repeat his conclusions uncritically. 27: In the 1960s, she says that text books were still idiosyncratic. Homogenization surged with enrollments in the 1960s. 28: Community colleges demanded a new type of text, more like high school texts. 28: Conglomerates entered the text business at that time. 28: The need to cover more topics caused a tendency toward superficiality and plagiarism. 29: In 1974, Harper & Row charged Meredith Corporation with copying its Child Development and Personality. Meredith had hired free lance writers with no background in psychology, gave them detailed chapter outlines. One memo warned writers to "resist the temptation to impose your own view" and follow the Harper and Row text. 29: She describes how texts crib from one another. She cites from the ruling against the charge of plagiarism brought by the publisher's Campbell R. McConnell's text "Economics professors, who shape the market, desire texts to which their own class notes can be adapted. Their notes, in turn, are the products of long familiarity with what might be described as "Samuelson methodology." These professors are presumptively unwilling to effect a reorganization of their own notes merely to satisfy the whims of a new textbook writer." McDonnough, Terrence and Joseph Eisenhauer. 1995. "Sir Robert Giffen and the Great Potato Famine: A Discussion of the Role of a Legend in Neoclassical Economics." Journal of Economic Issues, 29: 3 (September): pp. 747-59. 749: Giffen was only 8 when the famine occurred. The Giffen story appeared in the third edition of Marshall's Principles. There and elsewhere, he refers to the British consumption of bread rather than the Irish consumption of potatoes, and it appeared to refer to the latter half of the nineteenth century. 749: Stigler, George J. 1947. "Notes on the History of the Giffen Paradox." Journal of Political Economy, 55 (April): pp. 152-6 debunked the paradox. It does not seem to have come from Marshall or Giffen. 748: The story seems to have begun in Samuelson's textbook. All the other textbooks followed him, establishing the legend of the Giffen Paradox. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
