This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions that ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition, and renewal of the research program in the General Equilibrium Theory (GET), in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we trace the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. We construct a database of GET theorists and apply to this dataset a technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.

As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the History of Economics Society (HES), this issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought marks a significant milestone. The journal, as the official publication of the society, seeks to participate in commemorating this important occasion and acknowledging the society’s substantial contributions to the scholarly community over the past five decades. The society’s efforts have not only advanced research in the history of economic thought but have also fostered a vibrant intellectual community of historians and economists.

The Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm was the core framework of industrial organization for two decades, and had a significant impact on competition policy from the 1950s through the 1970s. This essay considers what made the SCP framework so influential in the United States, the shortcomings economists identified in the framework during the shift to the “new IO” in the late 1970s, and the lasting contributions that the SCP paradigm made on policy and the study of industry and competition.

Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence—in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a “Chicago school” of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 article, “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958,” was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays. I provide reasons that explain why a long-promised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman’s 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone.

The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a far-reaching growth in empirical exercises designed to measure the cost of living. Brazil was no exception to this movement, and the first studies of this nature for that country surfaced between 1935 and 1939. Among these, three deserve special attention for the soundness of their construction. These are the exercises of Horace Davis, Samuel Lowrie, and Bruno Rudolfer, professors of the Free School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo, which investigated the cost of living in connection with the pursuit of a proper minimum wage in Brazil. The aim of this article is to revisit their pioneering efforts to measure the cost of living and to indicate how these studies touched upon the search for a minimum wage in Brazil.

This article explores a debate on the theory of cost that occurred in the 1890s between economist Silas MacVane and Austrian economists. MacVane defended the idea of objective “real cost” and the Austrians argued for subjective opportunity cost. Although this debate is rarely mentioned, it represents a noteworthy episode of active contrast between ideas on value and on cost, with implications that are relevant for contemporary economists. By highlighting the incompatibility of the objective and subjective conceptions of cost, this debate sheds light on the evolution of economic theory. The contributions of relatively unknown authors, such as MacVane and David Green, are also discussed. We interpret the debate in terms of the contrast between research programs based on wealth and on exchange, and note that the gradual shift in the period regarding the fundamental problem that informs economic theory is key to understanding the modern concept of cost.

Beginning in the 1960s, subfields claimed a central place in the production and dissemination of economic knowledge. Generalists were replaced by economists who specialized in the study of international economics, public economics, labor economics, or econometrics. New infrastructure emerged, including field-specific societies and field-specific journals (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017; Cherrier 2017; Cherrier and Rebours 2023; Desmarais-Tremblay, Johnson, and Sturn 2023; Desmarais-Tremblay and Svorenčik 2021; Svorenčik 2021). Some of the earliest movers were those interested in social choice and the political economy of governance. In 1963, a coalition of economists and political economists established the Committee for Non-Market Decision Making; a preliminary conference led to the creation of the Public Choice Society, an annual conference, and a specialized journal, Public Choice (Buchanan 2003; Medema 2011).1 Public Choice was quickly followed by the Journal of Human Resources (1965), the Journal of Economic Education (1969), the Journal of International Economics (1971), the Journal of Public Economics (1972), the Journal of Econometrics (1973), the Journal of Urban Economics (1974), the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (1974), and the Journal of Comparative Economics (1977), all attached to newly formed societies and associations.

This paper aims to show how the 100% money proposal, which Irving Fisher came to support in 1935, connects to the rest of his work on monetary instability—in particular, to his credit cycle analysis of 1911 and his debt-deflation theory of 1932–33. Behind these respective analyses, we identify a common explanatory pattern of monetary fluctuations, the “debt–money–prices” triangle, which we use to show how Fisher’s explanations evolved over time, and how his advocacy of 100% money came as a logical conclusion.

This paper provides a reconstruction of the debate on “social value” among early marginalists in the US. This will be done in three steps. The first step analyzes John B. Clark’s approach to social value as presented in his Distribution of Wealth; the second step deals with other influential contemporaries who adopted a similar social value perspective, with a main focus on Edwin R. A. Seligman; the third step discusses those critics who, with due differences in emphasis and style, animated the debate over social value, reviewing (among others) the contributions of Herbert J. Davenport, Joseph Schumpeter, Benjamin Anderson, John Maurice Clark, and George P. Watkins. The final section presents some conclusions.

Largely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main coordinates of Keller’s sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin’s mechanism of variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner’s general scheme. Although Keller gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements of the typically Progressive Era preoccupations with heredity and the biological quality of individuals. The aim of this paper is to examine in some detail Keller’s views on eugenics and related issues, and to assess whether and to what extent these biologically deterministic elements played a role in his Darwinian approach to institutional change.

I attended the now famous conferences at Sussex in 1968 and Nottingham in 1969 that preceded the later founding of both the History of Economic Thought Society in the UK and the History of Economics Society (HES) in North America. In 1969, I also helped to found the UK Money Study Group at its first conference in Hove, while in 1970 I was at Karl Brunner’s first Konstanz Seminar. In both fields, these conferences were followed by many, many more. At that time new specialist journals were also appearing. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB), where I had a paper in the second issue, started life in 1969. So did History of Political Economy (HOPE), but there I had nothing to submit. Ironically, given Lionel Robbins’s still notorious attack on this proposed journal at Sussex, to which I shall return below, my first completed research paper in history of economic thought (HET)—on Thomas Tooke (Laidler 1972)—was already committed to his forthcoming Festschrift.

In 1901, Correa Moylan Walsh gained renown for writing a groundbreaking monograph on index numbers. His contributions to monetary economics, however, though neglected, transcend his work on index numbers, which was conceived to serve more foundational concerns of his. Therefore, our aim is twofold. First, we want to recover Walsh’s role as an important early twentieth-century economist. Second, we intend to provide a wider account of his incursion into monetary economics. Our argument is that the cornerstone of Walsh’s approach to the science of money is not confined to index numbers but concerns his distinction between different kinds of economic value and the discussion regarding the kind of value that money should measure and store. As such, we identify Walsh’s 1903 book, The Fundamental Problem in Monetary Science, as his archetypical work.

This paper outlines my own career within the History of Economics Society, my contributions to the society, and its central importance to my research endeavours. It is impossible for me to imagine having the career I have had without the HES, and my own case highlights how the society functioned to mentor and develop my academic career. This mentoring function is, in my view, the society’s most important, and one that has become only more vital in the face of the declining interest in the area within mainstream economics departments in the US, Canada, and the UK.

The purpose of the paper is to rescue Irving Fisher’s theorizing of the yield curve (1896, 1907, 1930) from relative obscurity and to contrast it with the better known and equally pioneering theory of John Maynard Keynes (1930, 1936). The paper also adduces evidence that Fed economists and the U.S. monetary experience in the 1920s greatly influenced these authors, both of whom were concerned with the management of the long-term interest rate.

Edgard Milhaud (1873–1964), a professor at the University of Geneva, published a series of texts (from 1932 onwards) promoting the establishment of multilateral international compensation between nation-states, and actively campaigned for this project. His plan centered on a call for a “gold truce” as an alternative to the bilateral clearing agreements that proliferated at the time. The plan drew the attention of several international organizations. It reached the point of arousing the interest of the League of Nations (LON), which decided in 1934 to launch an inquiry (published in 1935) questioning LON members about the project of making clearing agreements multilateral. The Milhaud plan nevertheless fell into oblivion after the Tripartite Agreement (1936) and then the outbreak of WW II. This work aims to situate the Milhaud plan in its intellectual and political context—i.e., the 1930s—analyze its content, and understand its failure. The article also assesses what it had in common with Keynes’s plan for an international clearing union developed several years later.

Especially with the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Asian countries have advocated a profound reform of the international financial architecture. Their proposals focused on two main axes: a reform of the global financial system, and stronger regional monetary integration in Asia. There are here significant parallels with the ideas of Robert Triffin (1911–1993). Triffin became famous with trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the international monetary system. The Triffin dilemma is still present among international monetary policy-makers, also in Asia. Triffin put forward several proposals for reforming the global monetary system, but he also developed proposals for regional monetary integration. These were very much based on his experience with the European Payments Union, and focused on the creation of a (European) reserve fund and a (European) currency unit. In this paper we focus on Triffin’s proposals for an Asian payments union in the late 1960s, giving special attention to Japan (in Triffin’s time, the biggest Asian economy; moreover, Triffin had an important Japanese network).

The Latin terms commonly used to signify “risk” are absent from Thomas Aquinas’s economic writings. Instead, Aquinas offers a lexicon of probability, prudence, and danger. This ternary lexicon brings with it a triple universalization of risk: first, a universalization through activity, including the activity of analysis considered as part of economic activity; second, a universalization through the agents, since everyone—the observer, the co-contractors, the prince, and the population—is affected by the risk; and, third, a partial universalization of its definition, since the lexicon indicates a risk that is not yet restricted by calculation, as the modern notion is, although some distinctions are already made by Aquinas. However, the lexicon describes only a risk of loss and does not take into account chance of gain.

I defended my doctoral dissertation on stochastic stability of general equilibrium systems in Penn’s Applied Mathematics program in fall 1968. That year I began teaching math for economists, mathematical economics, microeconomics, and even econometrics at Rutgers College, where I remained for a couple of years before moving to Duke. At Rutgers I saw that graduate students took required courses in micro, macro, statistics, math, and econometrics, and there were electives in other fields like public finance and economic history. I didn’t know that there was any subdiscipline, or field, called the history of economic thought.

This paper covers the development of the sawtooth wages model, a graphical representation of the behavior of periodically adjusted fixed nominal wages under persistent inflationary conditions. Ranging from the immediate postwar years to the late 1980s, our narrative covers the history of the model, underscoring Bent Hansen’s (1951) contribution, followed by several improvements that aimed to incorporate into inflation theory several institution-specifc traits of underdeveloped economies. The diagram had a lukewarm reception in the 1960s but managed to defend its legacy until the 1980s, as the inertial inflation hypothesis gained terrain in the debate on economic stabilization in Latin America. Under the widespread diffusion of indexation practices, the model was then fully rehabilitated as a workhorse for theoretical and policy analysis in Brazil until a succesful stabilization was achieved in 1994 under the Real plan.