This article is an addition to the revisited history of financial economics. While Markowitz (1952, 1959), Roy (1952), and Tobin (1958) are recognized as the founding fathers of Modern Portfolio Theory, we recall that its origins should be traced prior to 1914. We consider two, turn-of-the-century, French, financial analysts and suggest that notions such as risk aversion and risk premium, international diversification and correlation, specific and systematic risks and arbitrage were common sense for Leroy-Beaulieu (1906) and Neymarck (1913). The contribution of these authors to the development of Modern Portfolio Theory—long before the 1950s—should not be underestimated.

The significance of Haavelmo’s “The Probability Approach in Econometrics” (1944), the foundational document of modern econometrics, has been interpreted in widely different ways. Some regard it as a blueprint for a provocative (but ultimately unsuccessful) program dominated by the need for a priori theoretical identification of econometric models. Others focus more on statistical adequacy than on theoretical identification. They see its deepest insights as unduly neglected. The present article uses bibliometric techniques and a close reading of econometrics articles and textbooks to trace the way in which the economics profession received, interpreted, and transmitted Haavelmo’s ideas. A key irony is that the first group calls for a reform of econometric thinking that goes several steps beyond Haavelmo’s initial vision; the second group argues that essentially what the first group advocates was already in Haavelmo’s “Probability Approach” from the beginning.

This paper examines the arguments of Colonel Robert Torrens against the hypothetical prospect that rising corn prices might result in higher farmers’ profits by reducing the real costs of manufactured articles used in the crop-growing activity. First, it shows how this idea evolved through time in Malthus’ writings on rent. Next, it scrutinizes Torrens’ approach to the subject of value, from its origins to the more elaborate version built up in some of his early inquiries regarding political economy. The outcome of his effort was a simplified image of the mutual interaction among the productive sectors, similar to modern input–output models, composed of an interdependent system with prices and a uniform profit rate determined simultaneously. Finally, some applications for this innovative analytical device are presented, but with an emphasis on the refutation of Malthus’ proposition. The concluding remarks stress Torrens’ ability to devise a proper quantitative answer to the parson’s theoretical challenge despite the scanty technical resources available to classical economists at that time.

This paper examines Marx’s views on capitalist globalization and its supposed inevitability, and contends that they underwent a substantial evolution and revision after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. In the case of China, a prime example of the Asiatic mode of production, Marx even doubted whether globalization (capitalism) would ever be able to accomplish its historical mission of developing the forces of production and creating the material conditions for a higher mode of production, viz., communism. In the Russian case, he seriously entertained the notion that it could bypass the hardships and vicissitudes of capitalism and forge its own unique path to socialism. If accepted, this interpretation represents a serious challenge to the universality and validity of Marx’s materialist conception of history.

Endres and Harper (2011) maintain that, within the Austrian tradition of capital theory, Carl Menger and Ludwig M. Lachmann form a distinguishable trajectory. Both these authors, they argue, consider capital as a heterogeneous structure of higher-order goods. In this comment, it is demonstrated that the opposite is true. Menger and Lachmann endorsed contrasting views on the nature of capital. Whereas Lachmann indeed adhered to a heterogeneous capital concept, Menger considered capital to be a homogeneous concept employed in economic calculation.