The article discusses François Quesnay’s dynamics of capital accumulation. First, we analyze the notion of bon prix to highlight the central analytical role played by profits in Quesnay’s growth dynamics. This leads us to challenge Ronald Meek’s interpretation ([1962] 2003) and to (re)propose Peter Groenewegen’s suggestion (1974 and 1983) that profits are not included in the net product for policy reasons. We also show that profits display features resembling a stable income component such as supervision wages (see Marx [1863] 1963). Second, we contest Steven Pressman’s argument (1994, pp. 143–154) that Quesnay missed the distinction between nominal and real variables by modeling how the farmers’ monetary interest (and profit) initiates the capital accumulation process (see Vaggi 1985), which over time leads to an increase of the (physical) surplus rate and thus of the net product in real terms.

This paper examines two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the world monetary system, and the two economists, Robert Triffin and Fritz Machlup, who led the charge, one for centralized reserves, and the other for flexible exchange rates. Triffin would later claim that no one did more to ensure that floating exchange rates emerged the winner in the policy debate than Machlup because of his influence on academic economists and policy makers through the Bellagio Group conferences. The Bellagio Group conferences and Machlup’s leadership role are examined.

Despite the transnational character of the Great Depression, there are few works in the interwar literature that deal with the propagation of business cycles across national borders and systemic risks of depression in the world economy. Two notable exceptions are Hans Neisser’s Some International Aspects of the Business Cycle (1936) and chapter 12 in Gottfried Haberler’s Prosperity and Depression ([1937] 1964), which carries the heading “International Aspects of Business Cycles.” Both works differ substantially from each other and from the modern way of thinking about international business cycles in open economy macroeconomics. Haberler’s and Neisser’s approaches help to identify relevant issues that have been lost from sight in modern open economy macroeconomics.

In his recent article, Robert Dimand details for the profession the existence of four obscure papers by Irving Fisher (1935, 1936, 1937, 1940). He also brings to our attention two brief Econometrica contributions (Fisher 1946, 1947), neither of which is listed in the American Economic Association's Index of Economic Journals, as he points out. For this, and for his careful discussion of the content of those papers, we are indeed in his debt.

The paper analyzes the rise of the Latin American-based inertial inflation theory. Starting in the 1950s, various traditions in economics purported to explain the concept of “inflation inertia.” Contributions ranging from Celso Furtado and Mário Henrique Simonsen to James Tobin anticipated key aspects of what later became the inertial inflation hypothesis, building it into either mathematical or conceptual frameworks compatible with the then contemporaneous macroeconomic theory. In doing so, they bridged the analytical gap with the North American developments while maintaining the key features of the CEPAL (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) approach, such as distributional conflicts and local institutional details. These contributions eventually influenced the second moment of the monetarist–structuralist controversy that unraveled in the 1980s. The paper also highlights how later works by structuralist economists gradually stripped the inertial inflation approach of its previous substance and form, thereby unearthing tensions among Latin American structuralists that led to the eventual decline of this research program.

In 1971, Joan Robinson entered into a debate with the American neoclassical economist C.E. Ferguson in the Canadian Journal of Economics over the efficacy of the neoclassical theory of capital in light of the Cambridge Controversies raging at the time. Recent archival evidence from the Martin Bronfenbrenner Papers at Duke Archive has uncovered a heretofore lost reply Ferguson wrote to Robinson on or around September 1971, three months before his death. That reply is published for the first time as an Appendix to this article. Uncovering this reply, as well as correspondence between Ferguson, Bronfenbrenner, and Solow, shines a light into the American neoclassical camp of the late 1960s and early 1970s as the early phase in the Cambridge Controversies was drawing to a close.

There was no Jevonian revolution in international trade theory. The new ideas of marginal analysis entering British economics in the late nineteenth century seem to have left the field untouched. According to Schumpeter (1954, p. 609), Marshall “did not do more than polish and develop Mill's meaning … Edgeworth's famous restatement added many interesting details but also did not go beyond Mill in fundamentals.”

This paper focuses on the intellectual path through which Raúl Prebisch placed industrialization at the center of his economic thought and policy recommendations. It shows how the changing international context of the 1930s and 1940s made him depart from laissez-faire and adopt countercyclical policies, gradually abandoning the agrarian export-led growth model and finally embracing industrialization as the new growth strategy for Argentina and Latin America.

Although this essay is essentially an intellectual biography, personal experiences have influenced my career as an economist and historian of economic thought. For this reason, I shall devote some space to these experiences before turning to the main topic.

My parents migrated from Sicily to the United States prior to the First World War; met and then married in this country and eventually settled in Hartford, Connecticut. I was conceived in 1929, the year of the Great Crash and born the following year at the onset of the Great Depression. However, for my family our economic depression had begun in 1929, when my father was seriously injured at a construction site and spent the next 8 months hospitalized, leaving my mother, who was pregnant with me, and my two siblings, without any means of support.

Karl Marx's theory of land rent plays a minor role in his overall economic system but provides us with a good opportunity to examine and score his analytic powers and attained understanding. The conclusion arrived at from the present reinvestigation confirms, I fear, the diagnosis that Marx was an autodidact who lacked mastery of the subject matter that he so confidently grappled with. Objective readers of my analysis can form their own judgments of Marx's written logic and empirical contentions.

By the time Joseph A. Schumpeter was well into the writing of his History of Economic Analysis. that is, in the late 1940's, shortly before his death, Paul A. Samuelson was already well known in the higher circles of the profession for his precocity and brilliance.2 But, if later his impact on the discipline was to be ceremonialized, and quite accurately as such appelations go, as the Age of Samuelson, was this dimly if at all anticipated by Schumpeter when he wrote the History? How did Schumpeter treat Samuelson therein and was it different from his treatment of other contemporary economists, such as Milton Friedman, John R. Hicks, Oscar Lange, Abba Lerner, Franco Modigliani, and George Stigler, all of whom, for example, figure in the History?

Every theory of value has to perform certain tasks. In the narrowest sense, it must explain ratios of exchange on the market. But it must also give an account of social costs and benefits, and their distribution among individuals and groups. Value theory must relate human beings to the physical and biological realities. It must explain the relations between persons and groups. In fulfilling all these tasks, value theory reflects philosophical beliefs about how human beings perceive and react to nature and to each other.

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.

Human capital theory has suffered much criticism. The filter theory of education (Arrow 1973), the theory of education as a “signal” (Spence 1973), and the theory of “screening” (Stiglitz 1975), for instance, have seriously challenged it from within mainstream economics, and heavy criticism has also come from other paradigms, with Franck Bailly (2016) recently documenting the critique from the radical school. Within this set of ideas that flourished in the post-WW II period and challenged human capital theory, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the dynamics of the education process is often neglected. In his original institutionalist and firm-based approach to the evolution of education, Galbraith placed great emphasis on the issue of the requirements of the planning system when he tackled the issue of human capital investment. More surprisingly—since he is unanimously recognized as the “founding father” of the “human capital revolution”—Theodore Schultz himself developed a substantial critique of human capital theory that shares some ground with Galbraith’s. The aim of this contribution is to provide new insights into the history of post-WW II ideas in the field of economics of education by reviewing Schultz’s and Galbraith’s respective analyses of education and highlighting their proximities. Both authors raise doubts regarding the idea that the aggregation of individual choices must be regarded as the relevant generative mechanism of the dynamic of education and the basis of the allocation of education resources. Consequently, both question the equivocal concept of student sovereignty.