Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Dramatis Personae at the end of 1937
- Introduction and Summary
- Part I The roots
- Part II The approach of the Stockholm School
- Part III The impact of the Stockholm School
- 15 The Swedish influence on Value and Capital
- 16 The London School of Economics and the Stockholm School in the 1930s
- 17 Thoughts on the Stockholm School and on Scandinavian economics
- 18 Ragnar Frisch and the Stockholm School
- 19 The late development of the Stockholm School and the criticism from John Åkerman
- Part IV What remains of the Stockholm School?
- The Stockholm School: A non-Swedish bibliography
18 - Ragnar Frisch and the Stockholm School
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Dramatis Personae at the end of 1937
- Introduction and Summary
- Part I The roots
- Part II The approach of the Stockholm School
- Part III The impact of the Stockholm School
- 15 The Swedish influence on Value and Capital
- 16 The London School of Economics and the Stockholm School in the 1930s
- 17 Thoughts on the Stockholm School and on Scandinavian economics
- 18 Ragnar Frisch and the Stockholm School
- 19 The late development of the Stockholm School and the criticism from John Åkerman
- Part IV What remains of the Stockholm School?
- The Stockholm School: A non-Swedish bibliography
Summary
Whatever their differences in interests, outlook, and scientific style, Ragnar Frisch and the Stockholm School had one thing in common: Their main scientific interests and scientific contributions were of a methodological kind. They were more interested in changing the ways in which economists tried to understand the “world” than in supplying new explanations of how it actually worked.
To compare all aspects of their work would require roaming through the whole field of interwar economics. Rather than try to do that, I will narrow the field and compare only the macroeconomic thinking of Erik Lindahl and Gunnar Myrdal with that of Frisch. I have little to say about Frisch's influence on the Stockholm School, but will discuss his response to the work of the Swedes in detail.
Frisch and the Swedish tradition
Like the Swedish economists, Frisch was strongly influenced by Knut Wicksell. However, he read him differently. Although Frisch stood outside the Swedes' theoretical approach, observing it from the sideline, he discussed their approach systematically in a series of lectures on monetary theory held during 1934–5. In these lectures he voiced the skepticism that has inspired one major argument of the present paper: The problems that the theoretically oriented macroeconomists from this period attacked were too complex to be handled by the analytical methods actually applied. By theoretical macroeconomists, I mean economists who tried to explain phenomena like unemployment and inflation by relating them to some kind of neoclassical general equilibrium framework.
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- Information
- The Stockholm School of Economics Revisited , pp. 411 - 432Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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