The last decade has seen an outburst of growth models designed to replace the conventional Solow growth model, with its exogenous trend of technical progress, by more realistic models that generate increasing returns (to labor, capital and/or scale) as a result of endogenous technical progress. In contrast to the Solow model, the new models suggest that policy interventions can affect the long-run rate of economic growth. Nicholas Kaldor's growth model, designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to replace the Solow growth model, is a precursor of the new growth models.

This essay argues that beneath the superficial linearity of the history of neoclassical price index theory lie important conceptual ruptures that are linked to the ordinal revolution, including a radical transformation in the core objective for cost-of-living indexes. Revealing these ruptures produces a more accurate history of both the development of neoclassical price index theory and its reception. Furthermore, we can recognize how transformations in this theory have made cost-of-living indexes more coherent with existing traditions of empirical macroeconomics even as they may have reduced the indexes’ suitability for other functions, notably adjusting income payments.

In 1883 Henry Sidgwick complained that, with the recent undermining of the authority of political economy, “utterances of dissent from economic orthodoxy” could obtain a ready hearing. This was of particular concern to those writing and teaching on political economy at Cambridge University. As Henry Dunning Macleod was one of the dissenters named by Sidgwick, it appears odd that Macleod was also recognized as a lecturer in political economy at Cambridge between the late 1870s and mid-1880s. This article examines that peculiar occurrence, showing how Macleod exploited the struggle between reformers and conservatives over teaching reform in the university.

James M. Buchanan is a unique figure in modern economics. A Nobel Prize winner and a pioneer of public choice theory, he is in some ways a respected pillar of the profession. Yet at the same time, he is an outspoken critic of certain fundamental practices of mainstream economics who refuses to confine his work within the conventional boundaries of the discipline. Whether seen as an innovator or an iconoclast, he has consistently been among the most methodologically and philosophically self-aware of the profession's elite.

The Malthusian population doctrine formed an integral part of both theory and policy in classical economics: “[T]he Malthusian theory lent support to the subsistence theory of wages and prepared the way for the Ricardian preoccupation with the land-using bias of economic progress; by explaining poverty in terms of a simple race between population and the means of subsistence, it provided the touchstone for all classical thinking about economic policy” (Blaug 1997, p. 65). Among historians of economic thought there is probably little in this statement with which to disagree. A variety of interpretations, however, have been given to the subsequent career of the population doctrine, including its place in the economics of Alfred Marshall. Economists after John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter argued, found the population doctrine to be of little theoretical use to economics: many leading economists of the neoclassical school, including Alfred Marshall, “paid their respects to it, even though they no longer based upon it any part of their analytic structures” (1954, p. 890). Mark Blaug, by contrast, suggests that the analysis of population in Marshall's Principles of Economics indicates an “orthodox classical attitude to population problems” (1997, p. 385). Yet another perspective is offered by John Whitaker who remarks that early in his career Marshall resolved to transform the “old political economy into a new science of economics, open to the progressive intellectual and social movements of the day.” His intent was to leave behind the sterile controversies and pessimistic pronouncements of the old political economy, including those associated with the population doctrine (1996, vol. 1, pp. xvii, xx).

Liberal economists’ attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe: that is, membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet, Robbins, Jewkes, and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski’s definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals’ belief that people have to be nurtured to become effective citizens and have to be protected from the market’s disruptive effects. It is suggested that a nuanced approach is required in explaining why liberal economists came to believe the welfare state should make more use of markets and pricing systems for registering preferences and apportioning resources.

Public concern over the so called “trust problem” in the United States between the end of the nineteenth century and 1914, the year of the passage of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Acts, was reflected in the considerable contemporary literature on the subject. Not surprisingly, professional economists actively participated in this debate. Their thinking directly and indirectly influenced the legislation of 1914 in a way that cannot be said of the Sherman Act of 1890 (Mayhew 1998). A survey of the most important of these professional writings shows that, among the several voices animating the discussion, John Bates Clark's was perhaps the most influential. In this connection, Joseph Dorfman argues that John Bates Clark's second edition of his Control of Trusts (1912), co-authored with his son John Maurice, “played a formative historical role in policy making, for it provided the most systematic exposition of the view on trusts, that was embodied in 1914, at President Woodrow Wilson's urging, in the Clayton Act and the FTC Acts.” “From this standpoint,” continues Dorfman quite emphatically, “The Control of Trusts caught the dominant reform interest and in turn became a contributing force in shaping the trend of the socio-economic development of the nation” (1971, p. 17). Apart from the 1912 monograph, John Bates Clark devoted considerable attention to the problems of trusts and industrial combinations during much of his career, both in his professional writings and in his frequent contributions to newspapers and popular reviews.

Benjamin Graham’s amateur proposal for a commodity reserve currency (1937, 1944) has attracted the attention of professional economists and policy makers, but usually for their own prior purposes and designs. This paper places the proposal in the context of Graham’s own time and the intellectual resources available to him, with a view to elucidating both Graham’s own sense of the proposal and the reasons the proposal earned the reception it did.

This article fills a gap in the literature by examining the only leading classical economist whose influence on Spain has yet to be studied. In particular, it analyzes the influence John Stuart Mill had on nineteenth-century Spain by showing the impact of his multifaceted work both in scientific philosophy and utilitarian philosophy, and in political and economic theory, as well as in the world of feminism.

In this paper we examine the criticism that Knut Wicksell advanced against Léon Walras’s treatment of capital and interest at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the views of two distinguished followers of Walras concerning the points raised by the Swedish economist. As regards the first aspect, it should be noted that the criticism put forward by Wicksell at that time refers to the earlier editions of the Éléments, in which circulating capital is excluded from the analysis. We thus endeavor to clarify Wicksell’s remarks on the consequences of that exclusion for both the representation of the social production process and the determination of the interest rate. As to the second aspect, our discussion indicates that the appropriate way of treating the capitalistic element of production was an unsettled issue within the small circle of Walras’s followers at the end of the nineteenth century.

In Chapter 2, Book IV, of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith assesses the appropriateness of the policy of tariff retaliation or reciprocity. His deliberations are prefaced by a discussion of two rather innocuous cases that turn out to have very little to do with the main topic. In the first case it is advantageous “to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry” (WN, p. 463) when that particular industry is necessary for the defence of the country. Smith's second case refers to the situation when some domestic tax is being imposed on a good produced at home. In this situation Smith believed it reasonable that an equal tax should be imposed on the same good when it was imported (WN, p. 465).

François Quesnay and the Physiocrats are probably best remembered for three things: the Tableau Economique, their view that only agriculture was productive, and for advocating a single tax on landowners. Over the years, attention has focused on the first two doctrines. Numerous studies of the Tableau have attempted to explain how it operates (Eagly 1974; Eltis 1975; Meek 1963; Pressman 1994; Woog 1950). Adam Smith's (1937, p. 638 f.) critique of the assumption that manufacturing is sterile is well-known. In contrast, there have been few analyses of the single tax proposal. Previous studies have either reported the views of Quesnay and the Physiocrats on taxation (Einaudi 1967) or compared the tax policies of Quesnay to other economists (Buurman 1991).