Gerhard Tintner, “The Theory of Econometrics. Harold T. Davis” (1943)

Gerhard Tintner’s book review assesses Harold T. Davis’s 1941 The Theory of Econometrics as a pioneering textbook for an emerging discipline. Its central judgment combines praise for the book’s teaching value with recognition of its original contributions, especially in economic dynamics. Tintner presents econometrics as a field whose mathematical and statistical methods can be organized into a coherent course of study, accessible to economics students with some knowledge of calculus.

Econometrics consists in the application of mathematical and statistical methods to economic problems.

This definition establishes the breadth of Tintner’s assessment: econometrics encompasses mathematical economic theory as well as statistical investigation. He situates its recent development in the United States around Econometrica, founded in 1932, and the activities of the Cowles Commission. Yet he also treats Davis’s book as evidence of the subject’s international scope. American institutional prominence does not, in his account, make econometrics an exclusively American undertaking.

The review follows the textbook’s division into ten chapters on economic statics and ten on economic dynamics. Tintner approves the organizing distinction:

Statics is defined as the part of econometrics which does not involve time explicitly, whereas dynamics deals with problems involving time.

He finds this definition satisfactory from a mathematician’s perspective and close to the distinction in Hicks’s Value and Capital. Time’s explicit presence thus supplies the conceptual boundary between the two halves. Tintner does not develop an independent theory of statics and dynamics; he endorses Davis’s framework as a useful way to organize the subject.

The static chapters range across income distribution, utility, supply and demand, exchange, monopoly, production, budgets, equilibrium, and taxation. Their principal merit is pedagogical: competent exposition, numerous examples and problems, and extensive bibliographies make them useful for teaching and self-study. Tintner distinguishes this achievement from research novelty, finding relatively few original contributions in this part. His important exception is Davis’s generalization of the Pareto distribution function, intended, in Davis’s view, to fit the entire personal income distribution, including low incomes. Tintner praises the derivation as ingenious and significant while preserving the qualification that its comprehensive fit is the author’s claim.

The dynamic chapters receive greater emphasis because Tintner locates Davis’s main interests and original work there. They cover population, the equation of exchange, interest, insurance, index numbers, time series, business cycles, and international exchange. Some contributions draw on Davis’s The Analysis of Economic Time Series, also published in 1941. For Tintner, their distinction lies partly in confronting difficult statistical problems:

This is particularly true for the sections which deal with time series and which bring up, very courageously, many problems generally shunned in economic statistics, like serial correlation and forecasting.

The praise is methodological as well as evaluative. Tintner explains serial correlation as dependence between consecutive observations and notes Davis’s extension of Henry Schultz’s work on forecast errors. These subjects show the textbook addressing complications in economic data rather than merely presenting formal models. He also identifies Davis’s “resonance theory of crises” as an original business-cycle contribution, judging the discussion stimulating without reconstructing or testing that theory.

The conclusion returns to the classroom. On the basis of his teaching experience, Tintner considers the book readily usable by economics students somewhat familiar with calculus; its problems are generally manageable, and mastery would provide an excellent grounding in econometrics. The review’s significance lies in this conjunction of research and instruction. Davis’s pioneering achievement, as Tintner presents it, is to make a developing field teachable while bringing difficult questions of distribution, temporal dependence, and forecasting into its curriculum. His endorsement addresses economists and mathematicians alike, locating the textbook’s value at the intersection of their methods and problems.