How did economics get that way & what way did it get?

pline began in September 1940 when I enrolled as a freshman in the elementary economics course at Harvard College. I will try in this essay to make sense of the evolution of economics over a span of more than 1⁄2fty years. An analogy that comes to mind is from The Boston Globe. The Sunday edition occasionally publishes pairs of photographs of urban landscapes. They are taken from the same spot, looking in the same direction, but are at least thirty, forty, or 1⁄2fty years apart. One shows a corner of the city as it looked then and the other as it looks now. Some buildings have disappeared, some new ones have been built, and some of the old ones are still there but with altered facades. This description is also true of the landscape and structure of economics, and I would like to provide a few then-and-now snapshots. The difference, however, is that with economics something more is called for; the pictures have to be connected. I would like to tell a story about how and why the architecture of economics changed. It will be a sort of Whig history but without the smugness.