In a recent article in this journal, Laurent Derobert (2001) examined the origins of the canonical model of labor supply. According to this model, workers will exchange “leisure” for work at a rate determined by the hourly wage. In this case, labor supply will be a simple function of the utility of leisure and the utility of income. Paradoxically, this permits the understanding of labor supply to proceed without consideration of labor itself. Derobert identifies Philip H. Wicksteed (1910) as the originator of this approach. Apparently he was the first economist to model labor supply in terms of a leisure-income trade-off. Thus it is claimed that Wicksteed bequeathed to the economics profession the paradox of the “labor-less labor supply model.”

Some well-known economists suggest that a good economist should act like an engineer, a surgeon, a dentist, or even a plumber. These metaphors are useful in helping economists reflect the nature of economics and their role in society. But which is the most sensible one? This paper argues that economists should be playing all these roles and more, because economics is not a single entity, and each entity has separate goals, methods, and boundaries. To take this multiplicity of roles into account, this paper argues that in addition to the traditional boundary that delineates the disciplinary domain of economics against other sciences, an overarching boundary between economic science and applied policy needs to be recognized. It then examines Esther Duflo’s “economist as plumber” metaphor and suggests that a better metaphor for Duflo’s purpose would be “general contractor,” a metaphor that, if accepted, would suggest radical change in training applied policy economists.

The rise of European fascism in the 1920s and '30s triggered the greatest migration of intellectual capital the world has ever known. This paper is concerned with the German-speaking economists who formed the core of the original Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Among émigré economists of the interwar period, those who found refuge at the New School exerted a distinctive influence on American economics, partly owing to their concentration at a single institution, and partly by virtue of the character and quality of their work. The paper has three aims: to provide an overview of the contributions of these economists, to assess their impact on American economics, and to account for the apparent evaporation of their legacy after the onset of the Cold War.

In the article I examine how model builders from the academia and from the Federal Reserve Board confronted the Phillips curve in the construction and subsequent modifications of the Federal Reserve, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania macroeconometric model. It is argued that academic debates on Milton Friedman’s and Edmund Phelps’s accelerationist hypothesis, and the evolution of the macroeconomics discipline, did not affect the model-building agenda at the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board over the 1970s and 1980s.

The “technical” interpretation of Karl Marx's theory of value, which asserted that the concept of use-value played no role in his economics, has in recent years been shown to be ill-founded. In particular, R. Rosdolsky (1977) and S. Groll (1980) have established the importance that Marx attached to the concept of use-value in his theory of value, while I have shown that the use-value is an essential component of his analysis of the commodity, and that when properly applied, that analysis invalidates the labor theory of value (Keen 1993). This modern re-evaluation of Marx raises the question of how the traditional view developed in the first place. R. Hilferding aside, the answer does not paint a complimentary picture of the scholarship of either friend or foe of Marx in the debate over his theory of value.

This paper proposes a genealogy of the concept of homo œconomicus as it emerged from the methodological debate on the economic agent of political economy. If John Stuart Mill gave birth to the economic man in his 1836 essay “On the Definition of Political Economy,” he certainly did not baptize him. The expression was introduced by Francis A. Walker after Mill passed away in the 1870s. Economic man acquired its Latin name of homo œconomicus under the pen of French Catholic economist Claudio Jannet in 1878. Yet, only at the end of the century did Maffeo Pantaleoni (1889) proudly reclaim homo œconomicus as a building block of pure economics. In reaction to the evolutionary hedonism of Pantaleoni, Vilfredo Pareto then cleansed the concept of homo œconomicus and realized the Millian project of an abstract science based on an economic agent.

Economic justice in the labor market is an abiding issue of economic policy. Concerns regarding fair pay or just compensation were addressed in classical political economy and continue to be the objects of policy discussion. What constitutes a fair wage? How is a fair wage to be determined? Will competition in the labor market ensure that a fair wage is established? Should employers be required by the State, or persuaded on a voluntary basis, to pay wages that maintain a family's dignity and honor?

The main opponent to the Bank Charter Act of 1844 in the Currency-Banking School debates of the 1840s and 1850s was undoubtedly Thomas Tooke (1774–1858). As is well known, the 1844 Bank Act embodied the Currency School's plan for the institutional separation of the Bank's “public” function of issuing banknotes in exchange for coin (bullion) from its “private” business of banking, consisting of receiving deposits, buying and selling securities in the open market, and discounting bills brought to its door. The objective of this plan was to compel the Bank of England to issue its banknotes pari pasu with changes in its bullion reserves. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 was perhaps the first attempt to introduce central banking “rules.” Tooke's grounds for criticizing the Act are, therefore, of interest to contemporary monetary economists. From 1840 until his last publication in 1857, Tooke engaged in a relentless campaign against the institutional separation of Bank of England functions under the 1844 Act. Before the Act's inception Tooke criticized the Currency School's plan on theoretical, as well as policy grounds. After its inception Tooke mainly criticized the 1844 Bank Act for actually contributing to monetary instability. These criticisms stemmed from Tooke's long-established position on banking policy together with the Banking School theory he largely developed in the early 1840s.

In this contribution, we provide an interpretation of Friedrich von Wieser’s contribution to economics that pays tribute to the originality of his work and particularly to his view of how institutions interfere with individual behavior. This interaction takes place within a disequilibrium framework where social influences such as power or social class, and psychological factors such as force of habit or herd behavior, are the product of human action but also constitute constraints on further action. Section II stresses the institutionalist background of Wieser’s economics. We concentrate on Wieser’s general method—which we assimilate to an example of Joseph Agassi’s (1975) institutional individualism—and his analysis of the emergence and evolution of institutions via the dynamics of leaders and masses. In section III, we reinforce and illustrate the institutionalist stamp of Wieser’s economics by focusing on his work on monetary economics (Wieser 1904, 1909a, 1909b, 1927b) and his analysis of the emergence of money, based on our reading of Wieser’s Social Economics ([1927a] 1967) and The Law of Power ([1926] 1983).

Francis Wayland (1796–1865) became the president of Brown University at age 31, remaining so for twenty-eight years. According to the custom of that era, the president taught moral philosophy and political economy to the Brown undergraduates. Wayland published his lectures on moral philosophy as a textbook in 1835 (this essay cites the 1837 edition); his notes on political economy followed in 1837 (this essay cites the 1841 edition). The Elements of Moral Science ultimately reached 100,000 copies in print, while The Elements of Political Economy reached approximately 50,000 copies and its abridgment another 12,000 (Wayland and Wayland 1868, p. 389). Paul T. Heyne (1982, p. 126) states that Wayland's Political Economy “was by far the most popular political economy texbook prior to the Civil War,” with ongoing influence “through adaptations and imitations.” A comparison of book sales to college enrollments suggests that Wayland's Political Economy served a greater proportion of the market of its day than Paul Samuelson's Economics did between 1948–1980.

When the article “Experimental Confirmation of the Existence of a Giffen Good,” authored by Raymond C. Battalio, John H. Kagel, and Carl A. Kogut, appeared in 1991 in the American Economic Review it represented the culmination of two separate and seemingly unrelated traditions in the economics literature. The first is a now-venerable tradition of attempting to locate Giffen behavior in the real world. The second is a more truncated modern tradition of animal experimentation in economics. In their article, Battalio et al. combine these traditions through setting out to discover Giffen behavior in a laboratory setting using white rats as experimental subjects. The authors (p. 962) describe their experimental procedure:

Subjects were placed in an experimental chamber for approximately three hours each day, during which time they received their entire daily liquid food ration … A rat obtained quinine and root beer by pressing either of two levers mounted on a wall in the experimental chamber … Income was controlled by restricting the number of lever presses that would result in obtaining liquid. Prices were changed by varying the amount of liquid obtained at each lever press.

Irving Fisher is widely regarded as one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, and his achievements in neoclassical theory have had a profound influence on contemporary research. However, while there is no lack of research into the international diffusion of Keynes's thought, very little is known about how Fisher's ideas spread among scholars and policymakers throughout different countries. Yet, an understanding of when and how Fisher's writings influenced economic theorizing and policy debates worldwide could shed new light on the process of international transmission of economic ideas in general and on the evolution of the neoclassical paradigm in particular.

It is now almost eighty years since Michal Kalecki published his formal mathematical model of the business cycle. In this paper, we want to examine the vision embedded in that early model and the writings he published at around the same time. Sections II and III center on Kalecki’s approach to local and global (in)-stability, and section IV suggests a simplified model designed to pinpoint key aspects of Kalecki’s thinking related to the issue of endogenous cycles, ‘class struggle,’ and growth.

Jeremiah Whittle Jenks currently ranks as one of the more obscure academic economists of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. While other prominent economists of the era such as Richard T. Ely and John Bates Clark have been the subject of many books and articles (Everett 1946, Rader 1966, and Henry 1996, for example) Jenks remains almost unknown and unheralded. For instance, he is scarcely mentioned in the relevant volume of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Dorfman 1948, III), despite his very substantial scholarly and public roles in the economics of the day. He was likewise below the radar of Joseph A. Schumpeter's (1954) magisterial, History of Economic Analysis, and Mark Blaug's (1985) Economic Theory in Retrospect. Where Jenks's career has attracted scholarly notice, the aspects examined have focused less on his economic scholarship and more on his public policy roles. (Green 1956, Weinstein 1968, Furner 1975, Parrini and Sklar 1983) The reasons for Jenks's relative neglect are unclear, although several hypotheses will be entertained below.

The expulsion of the academicians from Germany, Austria, and other central European countries is for the history of social science as traumatic and significant an event as the bombing of Pearl Harbor was for the United States' naval fleet in the South Pacific. The Restoration of the Civil Service Act occurred on April 7, 1933, shortly after the National Socialists came to power. It ordered “disagreeable” persons to leave the Universities and was the harbinger of other “cleansing” that followed the German war machine into Austria, the Czech Republic, and so on. The start of this intellectual exodus occurred a whole eight years before the United States entered the war on December 7, 1941. The destruction of the American naval fleet by the Japanese air force in 1941 required a massive State-sponsored mobilization as the United States prepared for and entered the war in the Pacific. The destruction of social science in the German-speaking Universities started on April 7, 1933, and continued as the German armies moved eastward, resulting in no less than 328 dislocated economists who emigrated out of central and eastern Europe to rebuild their lives and academic reputations in other places, especially in the United States. As Hagemann has demonstrated, the United States “was the direct or indirect destination for some two-thirds of the German-speaking emigré economists” (Hagemann 2005). This “rebuilding” of lives, families, and scientific reputations is amazing in its magnitude and complexity and is also itself a topic for serious study and understanding within the sociology of the social sciences. Hagemann has made major contributions to the telling of this story (Hagemann 1997).

Roy Harrod (1951, p. 453) explicitly states that he “supplied a diagram purporting to reconcile the classical theory [of interest] with [Keynes's] theory, and he incorporated it in the [General Theory]-the only diagram in it!” (italics added). John M. Keynes (1936, p. 180n) himself writes: “This diagram was suggested to me by Mr. R.F. Harrod.” Furthermore, Harrod, in a letter to Ralph Hawtrey (19 June 1951) also says: “I was myself responsible for the diagram on page 180 which was an attempt to demonstrate to Maynard that his theories were not quite so out of line with the classical position as he supposed” (quoted in Warren Young 1987, p. 136). Now Rod O'Donnell (1999) claims that Harrod never supplied a diagram but only suggested how one could be drawn. Thus both Harrod and Keynes have misled us about the genesis of the only diagram in the General Theory. O'Donnell advances arguments in support of his claim which do not appear convincing.

The paper discusses the influence of Pareto’s methodological revolution on the Italian scientific tradition in public finance. To that end, the works of the most celebrated scholars from within the first, second, and final generations of this tradition are reviewed with reference to their reactions to Pareto’s idea of science as logico-experimental activities, and his contributions to the development of marginalism and theoretical sociology. The particular scholars considered across the three generations’ time span include Pantaleoni, De Viti, Barone, Einaudi, Sensini, Griziotti, Borgatta, Murray, and Fasiani. The main original contribution of this paper is the marshaling of evidence in support of the author’s proposition that Fasiani’s research program is characterized by a clearly Paretian mode of enquiry with regard to methodology and the economic investigation of fiscal activities, although the specific influence of Pareto’s sociology on Fasiani’s approach to fiscal studies was relatively modest. It is provisionally concluded that, in taking the best and most relevant of Pareto’s work for fiscal studies, Fasiani’s contributions came to represent the highest point in the evolution of the general theory of public finance in the Italian tradition.