Since its birth in 1944, the World Bank has had a strong focus on development projects. Yet, a project evaluation function was not made operational until the early 1970s. An early attempt to conceptualize project appraisal had been initiated in the 1960s by Albert Hirschman, whose undertaking raised high expectations at the Bank. Yet, Hirschman’s conclusions—published first in internal Bank reports and finally as a book in 1967—disappointed many at the Bank, primarily because they were found impractical. Hirschman attempted to offer the Bank a new Weltanschauung by transforming the Bank’s approach to project design, project management, and project appraisal. Instead, what the Bank expected from Hirschman was not a revolution, but rather an examination of the Bank’s projects and advice on how to make project design and management more measurable, more controllable, and more suitable for replication.

The history of this failed collaboration gives useful insights on the unstable equilibrium between operations and evaluation within the Bank. In addition, it shows that the Bank was active in the development economics debates of the 1960s. These insights should be of interest for those development economists today who reflect on the future of the discipline and emphasize the need for a non-dogmatic approach to the study of development issues. It should also be of interest for the Bank itself, with its renewed attention to the importance of evaluation for effective development policies. The history of the practice of development economics, together with the use of archival material, can bring new perspectives that contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of this discipline.

The paper investigates how Arthur Pigou came to adopt the reasoning essentially based on the working of the IS-LM model and to admit that money wage cuts are neutral to employment under the liquidity trap. This occurred through his involvement in the controversy with John Maynard Keynes in 1937–38. In the first instance, Pigou used a simple model to oppose Keynes’s assertion on such neutrality. Pigou (and Keynes too) applied verbal logical analysis to the model to derive his conclusions. Submitting a paper to the Economic Journal, Nicholas Kaldor analyzed Pigou’s model in mathematical terms and asserted that Pigou derived inconsistent conclusions from his model. Kaldor’s method eventually convinced Pigou, Keynes, and Dennis Robertson (who participated in the debate in correspondence). The paper thus argues that the controversy was concluded when one form of model analysis replaced another; specifically, when mathematical analysis replaced verbal logical analysis. This study provides a case study to the first category of Mary Morgan’s two functions of economic modeling: models as an object to inquire into and models as an object with which to inquire.

Based on archival evidence, this paper demonstrates that Keynes did not borrow the concept of the marginal efficiency of capital from Fisher, but, rather, developed it himself.

Wild price swings following World War I motivated some economists and their allies to start a stable money campaign. John R. Commons joined this campaign, and the story of his participation opens a window into an historical learning episode in which the campaign, though it failed, sparked intellectual efforts and interacted with events in ways that changed beliefs about relations between central bank actions, on the one hand, and unemployment, inflation, and economic growth, on the other. The paper dwells on Commons’ role and on the long learning experience that led participants to conclusions they could not have anticipated when they embarked on their campaign.

The scholastic intellectual tradition was the dominant scientific paradigm for nearly five centuries in western Europe. That the economic issues of interest to these scholars were similar throughout the period is undisputable, but were the individual views on these issues also similar? This is a pertinent question, upon which an evaluation of the evolution of this intellectual tradition, which often has been considered as monolithic, can be based.

This paper focuses on the analysis of the so-called “natural law case” against usury, and tracks how the lines of intellectual reasoning subtly evolved between early and late scholastics. While the issues, methods, and purposes of scholastic thought remained the same in this period, there also was a systematic evolution within this tradition that makes the essence of the scholastic doctrines conformable to economic realities.

This article draws attention to the high levels of unemployment in the mercantilist era, a parallel to conditions in the less developed countries at the present time. Understandably, distinguished economists of the twentieth century, writing before the publication of Keynes’ General Theory, tended to underestimate this problem. Actual causes of the high levels of unemployment are examined, including the fluctuating impacts of merchant entrepreneurs, agricultural revolutions, political unrest, and warfare, as well as nutritional deficiencies, which contributed directly to unemployment.