The disappearance of cooperatives from economics textbooks

The discussion of co-operatives abounded in the early 20 th century economics textbooks, but is virtually absent from their modern counterparts.In this paper, I assemble a dataset of economics textbooks used at the University of Helsinki during 1905-2005 and examine how the treatment of co-operatives has changed, and what factors have lead to the disappearance of co-operatives from economics textbooks.The quality and quantity of the discussion on co-operatives is noted to be much greater in books published before the Second World War than in the post-war books.Possible reasons for the lost interest include changes in the role of the government, the economists, and in the economics paradigm itself.