We are gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of something, that something being what Bertil Ohlin defined in 1937 as the Stockholm School. At the same time we could be said to be celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Erik Lundberg's 1937 book, Studies in the Theory of Economic Expansion. Or, becoming more personal, we are celebrating also the fiftieth anniversary of Erik Lundberg's thirtieth birthday and thereby acknowledging his three score and twenty milestone.

On this occasion I do not want to focus primarily on the single big question: Did that collective called the Stockholm School independently generate the same paradigm that Keynes published in his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest? Bertil Ohlin certainly claimed that to be the case in his famous Economic Journal articles of 1937. Abba Lerner (1940) and Don Patinkin (1978, 1982) have documented their disagreements with this Ohlin claim, and I must record a measure of agreement with their objective discountings.

I find it useful to broaden my discussion. Stockholm is one city in Sweden, and Sweden is one country in Scandinavia, a region whose scholars understand each others' languages. I believe that Scandinavian economics is a useful category to survey and analyze. At the least, it was that prior to the mid-twentieth century when English became the lingua franca for economic science pretty much everywhere in the world.