This paper investigates the influence of Allyn Abbott Young's theoretical work on the groundbreaking contributions of early development theorists, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Ragnar Nurkse. The work of Allyn Young had a significant impact on early development theory as the above-mentioned pioneers of development economics built substantial portions of their theories—the “big push” and “vicious circle and balanced growth,” respectively—on the dynamic external economies, an integral part of the vision of self-sustaining growth, as described in Young (1928).

The corpus of Jewish legal writings contains many discussions of economic issues and ideas. Yet, aside from a small group of scholars, historians of economics have tended to ignore the texts of Jewish law. As Ephraim Kleiman (1997) points out, the sheer size and inaccessibility of the Jewish law corpus presents a major barrier. Economic ideas are scattered across a vast amount of material. The canonical text of Jewish law is the Talmud, which spans 2,700 folio pages and two million words. Hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Talmud (or parts of it). There are three major codes of Jewish Law (based on the Talmud and selected commentaries), plus commentaries on the codes and lesser known codes (based on the major codes). About one million responsa (questions and answers in Jewish law) are known to exist; these are collected in hundreds of books. Today, new commentaries and responsa appear each year, in addition to multiple rabbinic journals. In order to understand these materials, the scholar must be well versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the reading of the Talmud.

This paper critiques the way Alfred Marshall is presented in many histories of economic thought, in particular, the typical neglect of the relation of his economic theory and method to his public policy proposals and views on economic evolution. A good example is the textbook of Stanley L. Brue, The Evolution of Economic Thought, which is specifically policy oriented. He notes in his remarks on Marshall's life and method: “Marshall's thinking left room for cautious reform, that is, modest departures from laissez-faire” (2000, p. 295). But the only illustration of this is Marshall's discussion of the welfare effects of industry taxes and subsidies. However, even here Brue concludes (2000, p. 316) with a quote from Marshall: “These conclusions, it will be observed, do not by themselves afford a valid ground for government interference.”

In several reviews of my Classical Economics (1987; henceforth CE) a criticism recurs relating to my proposition that distribution in Ricardian economics is dependent upon the pattern of final demand. Anthony Brewer, who is convinced by the demonstration in the book of ‘a fundamentally important core of general equilibrium economics accounting for resource allocation in terms of the rationing function of relative prices,’ has stated the objection fairly and his formulation invites and deserves a response:

In its brief history, the relation between game theory and economics has been characterized by phases of feverish elaboration of new contributions followed by periods in which an open skepticism concerning its usefulness prevailed. Moreover, this vaguely cyclical pattern of evolution has affected various research areas. After an initial period in which game theorists focused their attention on competitive market models, in the 1970s and 1980s they turned to the problems of oligopolistic markets and bargaining. Today the latter research areas are going through a phase of sedimentation and selection while other fields of study receive a strong impulse from the application of game theory.

In the current era of quantity theorists and inconvertible currencies, the real bills doctrine has received a surprising amount of recent attention (e.g., Sargent and Wallace, 1982; Smith, 1988; Selgin, 1989; Cunningham, 1992). While the real bills doctrine has a long history, the doctrine underwent considerable evolution during the period from the Bullionist debates of the Restriction Period, 1797–1819, to the Banking School versus Currency School debates surrounding the introduction of Peel's Act in 1844. The debates of the Restriction period are significant for being directly concerned with the workings of an inconvertible, real-bills-based paper currency while the later debates involved the real bills doctrine under convertibility. A primary objective of this paper is to explore the views that Robert Torrens held concerning the inconvertible and convertible versions of the real bills doctrine as a rule for central bank policy. Torrens's contributions as an anti-bullionist and, later, as a leading member of the Currency School reflect the importance that both convertibility and bank lending practices have for interpreting the real bills doctrine and the related law of reflux. The apparently paradoxical evolution of Torrens's monetary thought identified by Lionel Robbins (1958) is attributed primarily to the evolution of his views on bank lending practices.

It is clear from the enormous literature on the subject that Karl Marx believed that his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is applicable only to the capitalist mode of production. Is there, however, really anything in the law which confines it specifically to capitalist production? This is an important question which is not asked in an explicit manner in the literature on Marx's economics. His most important law or tendency about the internal contradictions of capitalist production might turn out to be a characteristic of production per se—including socialist production in its ideal form.

George Berkeley is unusual among economists for his practical dedication. While a great many pamphleteers write about acting for the “public good” it is rare to find someone involved in such acts on an everyday basis.

During the sixteenth century, successive waves of gold and silver reached Spain from America and then rolled across Europe to the North and East. Contemporaries made two observations. First, the inflow of bullion was associated with inflation. Second, a given amount of money in a country with relatively low prices tended to exchange for a larger amount of money in a country with relatively high prices. The scholastic doctors in Salamanca who interpreted these observations are traditionally credited with two modern insights, namely the quantity theory of money, and the principle of purchasing-power parity.

Employing different meanings of classical concepts of saving, capital, investment, and money, and incorrectly attributing the assumption of full employment of labor and a world of certainty to classical analysis, John Maynard Keynes ([1936] 1974) faulted Say’s Law as irrelevant to the real world. Roy Grieve (2016) ignores previous clarifications of Keynes’s misrepresentations and misunderstandings of John Stuart Mill’s restatements of the law. He employs similar misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s explanations as Keynes did. His model of Mill’s analysis is incapable of explaining how variations in relative prices, the value of money, and interest rates coordinate production, consumption, and savings decisions in a monetary economy.

There is a subset of scholarly literature that asserts that the title of Adam Smith’s famous work, The Wealth of Nations, is an allusion to passages from the Bible, such as Isaiah 60:5. Strong forms of the claim of this relationship between Smith and Scripture argue for a direct reliance of the former upon the latter. Weaker forms of the claim merely raise the possibility of the relationship or point more broadly to the significance and relevance of scriptural passages. This article sets these claims against the historical context of Smith and his work, finding that the relationship among “the wealth of nations,” Adam Smith, and English translations of the Bible demonstrates that Smith did not, in fact, allude to the passages in Isaiah. Thus, the rise of political economy itself, of which Smith’s work was an important element, was part of the background for, and preceded the appearance of, the phrase in English bibles.

A few years ago, an article by Arnold Heertje and Peter Heemeijer (2002) triggered an articulate and stimulating debate among scholars on the intellectual origins of Paul Samuelson's multiplier-accelerator model (1939a, 1939b). The discussion, which involved the participation of Samuelson himself, centered on whether, and to what extent, Samuelson's 1939 seminal contributions were inspired by Roy Harrod's The Trade Cycle (1936). Heertje and Heemeijer argue that “there is little factual support for Samuelson's suggestion ascribing the model mainly to Alvin Hansen, his mentor in the days of the creation of the model” (Heertje and Heemeijer 2002, p. 207). Instead, they provide convincing evidence indicating that it was Roy Harrod who actually played the major role in developing the ideas leading to the multiplier-accelerator interaction. “Theoretically speaking,” they assert, “it was Harrod who provided the most important contribution to the model. His interesting 1936 work The Trade Cycle contained valuable ideas regarding the combination of the multiplier and accelerator” (p. 217).

When I was studying the history of economic thought at the University of Melbourne in 1959 I was extremely fortunate to have Graham Tucker as my tutor. Tucker was Reader in Economic History in Melbourne during the second half of the 1960s and then became Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. Taciturn, understated, and droll, Tucker was a wonderful teacher who inspired a deep interest in the history of economics in all those who came under his influence. He was responsible for provoking my interest in Herbert Somerton Foxwell, although at the time it was more one of curiosity about a man who was in many ways an enigma.

John Rae, Scottish by birth, and a Canadian-Hawaiian (i.e. of the Kingdom of Hawaii) by residence, lived in Canada for about twelve years before the publication of his only work of significance in economies' and for nine years before he started writing it (James 1965,). He titled his book Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy, Exposing the Fallacies of the System of Free Trade and of Some Other Doctrines Maintained in the “Wealth of Nations” (1834) (obviously not a very memorable or popular title). The book was first conceived as an appendix to a statistical study of an aspect of the Canadian economy but, as sometimes happens, took a life of its own, in which references to Canada became merely illustrative and less frequent than to England, France or even China.

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career usually focus on his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s and his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the entropy law. These disparate moments, however, were connected by Georgescu-Roegen’s strong attraction to the study of problems afflicting less developed societies. This began with his work on the agrarian economy of his native Romania, in the late 1940s, under the auspices of Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Thenceforth, he embarked on a journey that spawned his early interest in Leontief-type linear models, an extended tour of Southeast Asia commissioned by Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Program in Economic Development, and several visits to Brazil during the 1960s. The paper highlights these lesser-known aspects of Georgescu-Roegen’s trajectory, examining how he built on neo-populist writings from the early twentieth century to construct an alternative to the mainstream emphasis on industrialization policies.

The standard view on John Bates Clark is that his The Philosophy of Wealth (hereafter Philosophy) written in 1886, was simply a reproduction of articles originally appearing in The New Englander (hereafter TNE), the journal that eventually evolved into The Yale Review. This view also holds that Philosophy represents Clark's so-called (Christian) socialist period that he abandoned sometime after 1886, and that he then began the process of development that resulted in his marginal productivity theory of distribution and a more generally conservative or precapitalist position.