Whatever their differences in interests, outlook, and scientific style, Ragnar Frisch and the Stockholm School had one thing in common: Their main scientific interests and scientific contributions were of a methodological kind. They were more interested in changing the ways in which economists tried to understand the “world” than in supplying new explanations of how it actually worked.

To compare all aspects of their work would require roaming through the whole field of interwar economics. Rather than try to do that, I will narrow the field and compare only the macroeconomic thinking of Erik Lindahl and Gunnar Myrdal with that of Frisch. I have little to say about Frisch's influence on the Stockholm School, but will discuss his response to the work of the Swedes in detail.

Frisch and the Swedish tradition

Like the Swedish economists, Frisch was strongly influenced by Knut Wicksell. However, he read him differently. Although Frisch stood outside the Swedes' theoretical approach, observing it from the sideline, he discussed their approach systematically in a series of lectures on monetary theory held during 1934–5. In these lectures he voiced the skepticism that has inspired one major argument of the present paper: The problems that the theoretically oriented macroeconomists from this period attacked were too complex to be handled by the analytical methods actually applied. By theoretical macroeconomists, I mean economists who tried to explain phenomena like unemployment and inflation by relating them to some kind of neoclassical general equilibrium framework.