Every Household Name in Economics : THE NEW PALGRAVE A Dictionary of Economics <i> edited by John Eatwell, Murry Milgate and Peter Newman (Stockton Press: $650, four volumes; 4,194 pp.) </i>

In the tradition of the “New Groves’ Dictionary of Music” and other monuments to the development of a single subject, comes this multivolume reference work on economics and on much else that touches this discipline: history, politics, mathematics, philosophy and a fair amount of the rest of social science.

The title is an homage to the late-19th-Century dictionary of the subject edited by H. R. I. Palgrave, and the work itself reprints classic entries in the old “Palgrave” written by the foremost economists of the 1800s. But like the discipline it reflects, “The New Palgrave” is very different and much larger than the work it supersedes. This is only natural, for it mirrors closely the ways economics as a discipline has changed and deepened in the last 80 years. Thus, the newer work devotes five pages to the topic of industrialization, and 22 to game theory--a subject that didn’t exist when the current editors were born. But this expression of relative importance in contemporary economics is authoritative. For more than half of the Nobel laureates in economics have contributed entries--and they are almost all on topics of high theory and abstract mathematics.

The coverage is vast: everything you ever wanted to know about economics from administered prices to zero-profit conditions. “The New Palgrave” runs to 4,194 pages and nearly 2,000 subjects. No economist assigned the task of reviewing it could possibly meet a deadline. The work is just too rich ever to stop reading and start reviewing. Something in the midst of one entry will lead the mind inevitably to another article, and that to a third, as the specialist reader wonders how the clash of theories and interpretations will work itself out. The cross-references, and the concluding subject index, are more of an invitation to savor the richness of “The New Palgrave,” than an aid to the uninformed.

Despite its Herculean proportions, the four volumes took only about five years to produce, from start to finish. For this we can thank the word processor and computerized type-setting. In fact, the entire work is available in an interactive computerized data base, in case there’s no more room on your library’s shelves. Because of the revolution in information-technology, we can expect more reference works like “The New Palgrave.” But it will not be easy to meet the standards for completeness and distinction that this work has set.

But, like any work of many hands, “The New Palgrave” is uneven. For example, there are many articles devoted to the chief glory of mathematical economics: general equilibrium theory--the proof that, under certain conditions, a system of decentralized market prices generates an optimum supply and distribution of goods. Western economists are unlikely to underestimate the importance of this proof, both as a theoretical foundation for the rest of economic theory, and as a bench-mark for anti-trust law, deregulation, welfare policy, international trade and the activities of central banks, like the Federal Reserve.

There must be a dozen distinct articles in which this same proof is expounded under a marginally different title. There seems to be a separate one written by each of the mathematical economists who have been awarded Nobel Prizes for establishing the proof, or improving its elegance and rigor, or extending it in influential ways. Some, like Gerard Debreu’s are marvels of accessibility to the uninitiated; others are too arcane for any one who doesn’t already know the ins and outs of mathematical economics.

Why the redundancy? Perhaps because the editors could not gracefully decline each of the laureate’s immortal place in “The New Palgrave.” But the result is duplication and inefficiency, as the reader jumps from cross-reference to cross-reference, until at last we get to a version of general equilibrium theory that doesn’t require a Ph.D. in economics to understand.

The temptation to give voice to all of the great living economists is natural. The commercial success and the authoritative standing of a reference work pretty much force the editors to give in to it. The result however is that controversial claims are sometimes given a mantle of consensus they don’t deserve. For instance, the entry for Karl Marx is contributed by Ernest Mandel, doubtless the foremost Marxian economist in the world. Mandel lauds Marx’s economic writings for “scientific rigor” describing them as “a systematic and all-sided analysis of the phenomena of the capitalist economy.” I fear other equally distinguished contributors to “the New Palgrave” will dissent from this judgment.

In one more respect, the work is uneven. There are many articles on non-economic topics of interest to economists: theories, concepts, thinkers, events, about which psychologists of philosophers are expert; subjects on which historians, lawyers or sociologists have labored. But these topics have been assigned to economists, and not to specialists in the other disciplines more qualified to write them.

The entries by these often less distinguished economists are not up to the standard set by articles on topics central to economics. It is some excuse to point out that what was wanted is the economist’s slant on these non-economic subjects. But there are writers at the intersection of economics and each of the other academic disciplines who could have produced such entries and met the otherwise high standards of “The New Palgrave.”

So, “The New Palgrave” probably could use a tourist’s guide, a sort of “Michelin” to award three stars, and direct the uninitiated from article to article in a way that makes sense of the incredible richness and detail of its contents, advising us what to see first, where to linger, what is indigestible to any but the most well-prepared, and what is missing altogether.

But that might have amounted to a fifth volume in what is already a work that will make any book shelf groan. Without it we must ask, just who is “The New Palgrave” for? Is this the reference to which you and I should turn the next time we come across a word in the business page that we don’t understand, say portfolio analysis , or flexible exchange rates ?

The great Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow says that “The New Palgrave” will be indispensable for the journalist or business executive. This is pardonable exaggeration. About the only people who will find that they cannot live without these volumes are doctoral students in economics, studying for their comprehensive examinations.

And because fate of the rest of us will soon be in the hands of today’s graduate students, in the future it may occasionally be worth our while checking their opinions against “The New Palgrave.”