This Presidential Address revisits Paul Samuelson’s views on the history of science and history of economics, with the advantage of archival evidence from his papers now deposited at Duke. It suggests he was not impressed with historians in general; but also, that his faith in the orthodox neoclassical profession failed him towards the end of his life, when those in the profession started to treat him the way that he had treated the historians.

This paper reconsiders the supposed agreement of David Ricardo and William Nassau Senior on the question of the method of political economy. The first part shows that Senior was very critical about Ricardo’s approach to economic phenomena and considered that this question of method had important consequences on theoretical points. The second part analyzes the way Ricardo was dealing with economics. It shows that though Senior was right in considering that their respective methods were different and led to important analytical divergences, he nevertheless misunderstood Ricardo’s method with a hypothetico-deductive one. The consequence is that Senior’s criticisms on Ricardo’s theories of rent, natural wages, and of the tendencies of agricultural returns to decrease and of profit to fall are ill-founded, being based on a misunderstanding of the way they were established.

The paper argues that oikonomia was defined by the ancient Greek philosophers as a sphere in which man, when faced with excessive means, acquires a theoretical and practical prudent disposition in order to comply with his needs and so as to generate a man-made surplus that is to be found outside economy’s boundaries. In order to extricate this meaning, I focus on how the following categories are presented in ancient texts dedicated to the study of the oikonomia in its meaning of household management: i) oikonomia’s form of knowledge; ii) the essence of wealth and its end; and iii) the origin of the excess that appears in the economic sphere.

In Wealth of Nations, a high rate of profit is associated with sluggish or even negative growth, and vice versa. This is because capital accumulation (and therefore population growth) is driven by parsimony of the masters; and the incentive to self-denial is eroded by a high income too easily obtained. The causal relation between parsimony, the rate of profit, and accumulation is explicated in this article; Adam Smith’s observations concerning “the merchants of Cadiz and Lisbon” examined critically; and some conjectures offered as to why Smith’s successors should have rejected parsimony as a useful concept.

The modern Ricardian equivalence theorem focuses on the intertemporal equivalence between taxation and bond financing of government expenditures that David Ricardo considered practically irrelevant, rather than their contemporaneous equivalence in terms of the opportunity cost of government spending. Relying upon the implausible assumption of each individual’s future tax-capitalization behavior that Ricardo explicitly rejected, the modern Ricardian equivalence theorem reaches the exact opposite conclusions about government deficit spending than Ricardo argued. This paper explains these fundamental problems with the modern Ricardian equivalence proposition and shows an alternative method of arguing Robert Barro’s original point about the inefficacy of Keynesian deficit spending.

This paper provides a refutation of the “absolute immizeration” doctrine that S. Hollander attributes to Marx, by emphasizing the Marxian original categories and laws of capitalist production in order to base Marx’s opposition to this doctrine on his more profound opposition to Classics about the law of supply and demand for labor.

The paper proceeds as follows: first, it is shown that the Marxian subsistence wage does not exclude population growth. Second, the analysis of surplus population will reveal how it is not only a condition of the business cycle, but also one of its immediate results. In this sense, the so-called theory of dual labor force, which Hollander uses to discard the role of surplus population in the decreasing real-wage trend, proves a misunderstanding of the origin and nature of the industrial reserve army.

From the labor demand side, on the other hand, the endogeneity of technical progress precludes any “ongoing process” of increasing organic composition of capital. Finally, it will appear that categories of labor power, wages defined as the value of labor power, or laws such as decreasing necessary labor and increasing surplus labor, allow Marx to develop a law of supply and demand for labor partly unrelated to the number of workers and the evolution of population growth, which necessarily rules out any birth-rate control policy.