Department of Economics

Scott’s first tenure-track appointment took him to the newly established Carleton University (Ottawa, Quebec) where he organized its economics department and was its chair for six years. He was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1957. His seminal 1954 Journal of Political Economy article “Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery,” initiated modern research in fishery economics and was critical for the development of the broader economics of exhaustible and renewable resources. Google Scholar reports more than 5500 citations, making this one of the most highly cited articles in contemporary economics. Garrett Hardin’s popular 1968 essay entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons” rediscovered Scott’s major themes without realizing his earlier contribution.

Scott’s common property paper illustrated the logic of rent seeking behavior in the context of over fishing of open access fisheries. He proposed the imposition of individual fishing quotas as a policy solution to over fishing. Even today, this work is considered by many to be path breaking in its influence on generations of scholars as providing the foundational argument for over-use of the commons. This work had a significant impact in the early work of another IU Distinguished Professor, Elinor Ostrom, including the experimental research she conducted with Roy Gardner and James Walker of the IU Economics Department. The 2009 Economics Nobel Prize awarded to Professor Ostrom acknowledged the overarching importance of her work on common pool resources with Professors Gardner and Walker.

Indiana’s Department of Economics hired Scott as Professor of Economics in 1966, and he was the department’s chair from 1970-1973. His appointment at Indiana University was split, in 1983, between the Economics Department and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. In 1970 he was also appointed to the faculty at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) to teach a summer course for graduate students in the history of economic theory. He continued to do so until 1996.

Scott was appointed Distinguished Professor of Economics in 1981 and gave IU’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 1990. In recognition of his role in the establishment of an economics curriculum at Carleton, a symposium in his honor was held there in 1988 and published as a festschrift. Carleton awarded him an honorary degree of LL.D. in a 1992 ceremony. His other honors include the awarding of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, the presidencies of the Canadian Economics Association and the Western (U.S.) Economic Association in 1976-1977.

Scott was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1924, and attended public school, high school, and college there, obtaining his college degree from Dalhousie University in 1944. A scholarship led him to New York and Columbia University for the A.M. degree, followed by a fellowship at McGill University, Montreal, and as a lecturer in economics in 1947-1948.

As discussed by his former student and colleague, George W. Wilson (Distinguished Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Indiana University), writing in the 1989 edition of the Department’s The Trend Line alumni newsletter, noted that a visit to Cambridge University, England, in 1954-55 on a Social Science Research Council of Canada fellowship resulted in another of Scott’s most fascinating articles, “The London Economist and the High Tide of Laissez-Faire,” the lead article in the 1955 Journal of Political Economy. Focusing on the propagation of economic ideas, Scott developed an important intellectual argument for the role of politics and journalism in the development of classical economics and its role in modern economic theory. Besides his well-known 1954 and 1955 papers Scott published many other articles in the Journal of Political Economy such as: “The London Economist and the High Tide of Laissez Faire” (1955), "“hy Does Marxian Exploitation Theory Require a Labor Theory of Value?” (1968), “Frank Knight and the Tradition of Liberalism” (1974), “The New Contractarians” (1976), and “Should Economists Pay Attention to Philosophers?” (1978). His papers published in other academic journals also reflected such historical and philosophical concerns.

Distinguished Professor Wilson goes on to note Scott’s tenure at IU was not limited to research. “Publication stems, in his case, from a perceptive, inquiring, and energetic mind. This makes him a wonderful conversationalist. People also seek him out for advice and counsel, which he invariably gives with much concern and wisdom. His voice was always eagerly awaited, for example, in the Bloomington Faculty Council, to which he was often elected.”

Professor D. Wade Hands (IU Ph.D., 1981), a leading researcher in contemporary studies of the philosophy and history of economics writes that Scott was “always interested in, and writing about, historical, political and philosophical ideas in ways that were quite unusual among mid-twentieth century economists.” He goes on to observe there was no intellectual infrastructure or social networks traditionally associated with academic fields of inquiry (e.g. specialist journals, conferences, and professional societies) specifically devoted to the history and philosophy of economics. This changed in 1969 with the founding of the History of Political Economy and other journals and organizations. While Scott did not directly participate in the creation of these new academic institutions in the late1960s through the middle 1970s, those outlets reflected his core intellectual interests. Professor Hands notes that many of Scott’s students played an active role in developing and promoting these journals and organizations.

Scott’s thinking about historical and philosophical questions in economics are clear from the titles of three of his most important books: Welfare, Justice and Freedom (1980), The History and Philosophy of Social Science (1991), and Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today (2002). Professor Hartwick also notes that Scott “worked up an annotated version of Keynes General Theory” but was unable to publish it owing to copyright problems.

Scott took his interests in the history and philosophy of economics so far as to hold a joint appointment in IU’s History and Philosophy of Science Department (HPS) starting in 1983. Professor Hands remarks that “not only is it unusual for an economics professor to hold a joint appointment in history or philosophy of science, his appointment in the HPS department was doubly unique since the department itself was one of only two such departments in the United States.” He goes on to say that HPS was perfectly suited to Scott’s intellectual tastes. “He was always interested in the history of economics (and social science more generally), as well as in the philosophy of these fields, but he never let either the history or philosophy dominate, and this is very rare. “Scott’s even-handedness produced histories that were thick and yet he was not shy about making normative methodological evaluations about this theory, or his model versus that model. He was ideal for the joint appointment and it was an appointment that served both the students and faculty of the two departments extremely well.”

Scott was known by his friends, students and colleagues for his enduring friendship, his love of life, and the depth and breadth of his academic contributions. His many achievements have impacted scholars for decades and will continue into the future.

This memorial resolution draws on information in an article written by Professor George W. Wilson for the Department of Economics The Trend Line, Volume 10, Fall 1989, as well as by private communications from Professor John Hartwick and Professor D. Wade Hands.