In 1912 Guillermo Subercaseaux (1872–1959), a professor of economics at the University of Chile, published El Papel Moneda, translated into French in 1920 as Le Papier-Monnaie. The paper provides a full treatment of Subercaseaux’s interpretation of the working of paper-money economies, including his approach to the determination of the exchange rate of depreciated currencies and his views about the problem posed by the existence of a positive value of inconvertible paper money. We investigate how his framework was related to classic contributions by Adolph Wagner (1868), Carlo Ferraris (1879), and Wesley C. Mitchell (1903, 1908). We also deal with the background formed by the South American debates between ‘papeleros’ and ‘oreros’ (paper-money and gold-standard supporters) at the time. The paper offers an investigation of an aspect of the international transmission of economic ideas, this time from the periphery to the center.

Albeit concerned with the biological element in social evolution, Albert B. Wolfe was among the very few economists of the progressive era who openly expressed their concerns about certain implications of eugenic rhetoric for the social science. Specifically, Wolfe questioned the strong hereditary boundaries that more extreme eugenicists suggested about human beings. A careful examination of Wolfe’s writings reveals that his reaction was rooted in the belief that many of the social problems that eugenicists attributed to hereditary limitations were actually imputable to the influence that the social, economic, and physical environment exercised on the individuals.

This article focuses on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and other of his writings that were prompted by the unsustainable socio-economic and geo-political conditions under which the poor native Irish were living. The article begins with introductory comments and then moves to conditions in Ireland when Swift was writing that contributed to his strong concern for the native poor. Next is provided a summary of “A Modest Proposal” and consideration of what drove Swift to the extreme he reached in the essay. Following this, Swift’s writings are explored as indicators of his opinion of political arithmeticians, and conclusions close the paper.

Jacob Viner’s The Customs Union Issue, published in 1950, is the one undeniable classic in its field. The first part of this paper traces the development of Viner’s thinking on preferential trading arrangements, places his work in context, and clarifies his position on disputed issues. The second part considers the reception of his work, from the enthusiastic early reviewers to the international economists who further developed the theory of customs unions, to contemporary practitioners. While practitioners consistently misread Viner, these misreadings were scientifically fruitful, and there are reasons why fruitful science might flow from poor contextual history. Among contemporary international economists, the book has become a classic, marking off and justifying a field of enquiry.

The paper discusses the work of Giacinto Dragonetti, a disciple of the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi, founder of the Economia Civile tradition. Dragonetti’s short book, A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, appeared in Naples in 1766, shortly after Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764). In the Treatise, Dragonetti advances a theory of action based on awards for virtues. The idea of awards relies on the hypothesis that good or virtuous citizens act for intrinsic reasons. Modern economics has followed the path of incentives (and “punishments”), not that of awards. The paper argues that Dragonetti’s contributions remain relevant not only for the history of economic thought, but for contemporary economic theory, as well.