In his article published in JHET in 2022, Vincent Carret (2022a) criticizes our work. In footnote 19, pages 630–631, he claims that our result “is based on a mistaken interpretation of the paragraph at the bottom of p. 191 of Frisch (1933).” He then states that we “take to mean that the coefficient of each cycle in the general sum of solutions is arbitrary, while … these coefficients [depended] on initial conditions and the parameters of the system.” The present rejoinder aims at rebutting Carret’s allegation of mistaken interpretation in our work. We demonstrate that his statements are based on a misunderstanding of Frisch’s econometric model and approach. Then, we show that Carret’s results are not supported by the demonstration he claims to have made, and that he misrepresents our arguments.

This study deals with the debate that took place among Italian economists and statisticians at the turn of the twentieth century on the economic effects of mass emigration. In particular, it is focused on a controversy between Vilfredo Pareto and Alberto Beneduce on the one side, and Francesco Coletti on the other. It analyzes the way these scholars struggled with: (i) the problem of properly elaborating a specific cost-benefit analysis regarding emigration; and (ii), as a consequence, the problem of recognizing a clear set of economic policies designed to manage the complex economic and social processes connected to emigration. The paper demonstrates the enduring character of the problems encountered in the early Italian debates by showing that these questions are similar to those debated in the vast literature developed from the 1950s on the subject of brain drain, and suggests an explanation for the lack of conclusive results in this literature. We think that it is possible to understand this impasse by highlighting that in the analyzed literature, a problem of “fallacy of composition” emerges between the microeconomics and macroeconomics of emigration.

I can conceive of few academics presumptuous or foolhardy enough to write an “intellectual autobiography” unless invited to do so. It is no easy assignment. One seeks to protect a core of privacy; there is a residual subjectivity regarding events and persons that cannot be eliminated; one is obliged to tone things down for practical reasons. Even if one can hope to tell the “truth” it will not be the whole truth—certainly not in twenty-two pages. It must also be said that any linkages that might be suggested between character or experience and professional contribution (and an intellectual autobiography of course seeks out such linkages) can never progress beyond the stages of hypothesis; neither necessary nor sufficient causation is at issue. Yet I myself have learned something from this exercise; perhaps my readers will too.

This paper traces interpersonal utility comparisons and bargaining in the work of John Harsanyi from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. As his preoccupation with how theorists can obtain information about agents moved from an approach centered on empathetic understanding to the more distanced perspective associated with game theory, Harsanyi shifted emphasis from the social scientist’s lack of information vis-à-vis agents to agents’ lack of information about each other. In the process, he provided economists with an analytical framework they could use to study problems related to the distribution of information among agents while consolidating the perspective of a distant observer whose knowledge can replace that of real people.

The article analyzes the economic entries of the main Spanish general encyclopedias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Diccionario enciclopédico (1887–1898) and Enciclopedia universal (1908–1930). Both works include the contributions of prestigious Spanish and Latin American intellectuals, and were designed for distribution in Spain and Latin American markets. Diccionario enciclopédico was the first to introduce the “social question” in its economic entries, which were drafted by the most outstanding Spanish economists at the time. These entries were characterized by the absence of any significant mention of historicism and marginalism, which illustrates the isolationism of Spanish economists during the late nineteenth century. Enciclopedia universal, on the other hand, was not entirely drafted by academic economists. Nevertheless, its economic entries account for a complete outline of marginalism, Marxism, and historicism. Apart from the traditional goals of compiling the intellectual advances made in any area of human knowledge for educational purposes, the economic entries of both encyclopedias aimed at popularizing some kind of economic knowledge in order to prepare minds for the reception of specific doctrines and agendas: the secular social doctrine of Spanish Krausism and the religious Social Catholicism, respectively.

The integration of money into the Walrasian general equilibrium scheme is an age-old and intricate issue. One of the first attempts was made by Gustavo Del Vecchio, who, in the early twentieth century, built a theory of circulation that considered money as a medium of exchange, and investigated its organizational and social aspects in depth. Del Vecchio developed a theory of monetary service grounded on the distinction between individual and social utility of money. Moreover, he stated that money, credit, accumulation, and crisis could no longer be theorized with time omitted, and this induced him to formulate dynamic statements that put forward claims about money as a store of value. The organizational and social dimensions of money, time, and uncertainty were all important and interconnected aspects in Del Vecchio’s scientific inquiry, for they all sprang from his conceptualization of money as a medium of exchange.

For those readers who are not familiar with the history of Italian economic thought, the Cost of Reproduction Doctrine (CRD) is an interpretation ofthe theory of value developed by the distinguished scholar Francesco Ferrara (1810–1900) around the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a time when many of the flaws of the classical system had been identified but the analytical tools needed for their elimination were not yet available.

In the aftermath of the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution, the years 1920–1925 witnessed a great upsurge of academic writing in Britain on Karl Marx's theory of value. We shall not seek to explain this phenomenon but it may nevertheless be of interest first to sketch, as a contrasting background, the limited interest shown in this topic in the pages of the Economic Journal, 1891–1920. For that journal did indeed, in that period, devote considerable space to matters socialist—taken in a broad sense (see Steedman 1990).

In contrast to the common maxims for good taxation, Antonio De Viti de Marco revolutionized public finance studies by placing collective economic activity within a theoretical framework and trying to explain concrete fiscal phenomena such as tax incidence or public debt. The polar cases of cooperative and monopolistic states and the state factor of production are usually considered characteristics of such a framework. Here, we remark that De Viti’s theory of the cooperative state appears grounded only on the principles of minimum means and of political competition, and on the assumption that individual income is a proxy of individual consumption of general public services. Thus, it appears that the characteristics might be inessential to the real core of his theoretical framework. Moreover, we claim that his theoretical framework was not actually applied in his explanation of concrete fiscal phenomena. Finally, we remark that he seldom employed marginal tools in his Principî.

In the early twentieth century, an economic doctrine known as “non-proletarianization theory” became influential among left-wing Zionists in Russia. According to this theory, Jewish workers were unable to “proletarianize”—that is, to integrate large-scale industry; hence, Jewish territorial autonomy was required, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. This article analyzes this theory’s historical development, focusing on the works of three authors: Haim Dov Horovitz, Yakov Leshchinsky, and Ber Borochov. I claim that discussions of Jewish non-proletarianization can be considered a specific and coherent intellectual tradition in the history of economic thought. I also discuss these theories’ relation to the anti-sweatshop campaign of the Progressive Era, particularly John R. Commons’s writings on Jewish immigrants that were recently debated in this journal.

This paper intends to provide a comprehensive and critical survey of the valuable but neglected contributions of Fritz Machlup to the debate on the Transfer Problem. Machlup took three different and conflicting lines of approach to the problem in the course of his lifelong study of it. The third, which is of a basically monetary character, provides original results, especially in relation to the demand-oriented and quantitative approach that dominates in the standard literature.

Fr. John A. Ryan (1869–1945) was one of the early advocates of minimum wage laws in the United States. The thesis of this paper is that in three respects Fr. Ryan stood apart from other advocates of the minimum wage. First, during the period of his work, economics was developing on the basis of the positivist conception of science. Fr. Ryan’s case for the minimum wage combined economics with “non-scientific” theology and philosophy. Second, most religiously motivated American reformers were Protestants, and their advocacy was grounded in the Protestant Social Gospel movement. This was different from Fr. Ryan’s grounding in the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which themselves were grounded in the Catholic Church’s constant teaching that man is made in the image of God. Third, many reformers were motivated not at all by religion, but by the utilitarian calculus that had become the foundation of the social sciences. Although Fr. Ryan made utilitarian judgments in his analysis, he was not an ethical utilitarian.

A recent comparative study of the economists' participation in government, draws negative conclusions with respect to this profession in Italy. The Italian case was shown to have been weak both in the teaching of economics at University level and lacking in the provision of a clearly defined and a highly specialized academic training. The complaint that Italian economists were generally devoted to teaching microeconomics, rather than macroeconomics, which is more strongly linked to political and productive demands, has often been heard.

Erik Lundberg, 1907 to 1987, was the last and one of the best of the 1930s vintage of Stockholm School economists. His Studies in the Theory of Economic Expansion, hereafter cited as Studies, represented a significant advance in dynamic theorizing but has scarcely received any attention outside Sweden. The purpose of this essay is acquaint modern economists with Lundbergs achievement.