Association for Evolutionary Economics

The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is an international organization of heterodox economists working in the institutionalist and evolutionary traditions of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons and Wesley Mitchell. It is part of the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA), a group of approximately 55 organizations including the American Economics Association (AEA), that holds a three-day meeting each January.

AFEE originated in 1959 as an informal group that met in a rump session of the ASSA meetings. They called themselves the Wardman Group after the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington D.C. where the initial 1959 meeting took place.

The founding members were economists who found it increasingly difficult to get their papers included on sessions sponsored by the American Economics Association. Although the AEA was founded by the institutionalist economist Richard T. Ely, by the 1950s it had drifted away from the institutionalist approach and towards abstract mathematical modelling. The members of AFEE are sometimes called "old institutionalists" to distinguish them for the followers of New Institutional Economics.

The Wardman Group renamed itself the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in 1965. Clarence E. Ayres was elected the first president and he presided over presentations at the ASSA meetings in San Francisco in December 1966. In 1967, AFEE began publishing a quarterly academic journal, the Journal of Economic Issues.

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