I review changes over time in the meaning that economists in the US attributed to the phrase “statistical inference,” as well as changes in how inference was conducted. Prior to WWII, leading statistical economists rejected probability theory as a source of measures and procedures to be used in statistical inference. Trygve Haavelmo and the early Cowles Commission econometricians developed an approach to statistical inference based on probability theory, but the arguments they offered in defense of this approach were not always responsive to the concerns of earlier empirical economists that the data available to economists did not satisfy the assumptions required for such an approach. Despite this, after a period of about twenty-five years, a consensus developed that methods of inference derived from probability theory were an almost essential part of empirical research in economics. I conclude with some speculation on possible reasons for this transformation in thinking about statistical inference.

The Econometric Society was founded in December 1930. Invitations for a meeting to establish “an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics” had been distributed by Irving Fisher, Ragnar Frisch, and Charles F. Roos, together with a draft constitution. In June 1930, the same instigators had sent a form letter to a list of thirty-one scholars from ten different countries to solicit advice on establishing an international association “to help in gradually converting economics into a genuine and recognized science.” The hitherto unpublished responses are set out in the paper. The impact of the solicited advice, not least from François Divisia and Joseph Schumpeter, on the formation of the Econometric Society is discussed in some detail.

Ever since the French Revolution, Abbé de Mably has been portrayed as a forerunner of utopian communism and common ownership, and, more recently still, as a “classical republican” in the Age of Enlightenment. This article aims to reappraise Mably’s position. We attempt to show that he proposed a science of commerce in his Droit public de l’Europe (1746), and that his economic ideas displayed continuity and consistency throughout his lifetime. Far from being an enemy of trade, Mably sought a realpolitik in an attempt to strike a balance between the race for the enrichment of nations of the Moderns and the virtues and equality of the Ancients that he never thought possible to restore. The paper also examines his place in the history of economics. In particular, the similarities and differences between Mably’s ideas and those of the Gournay circle are studied, the issue of inequalities being the dividing line between them.

There is a subset of scholarly literature that asserts that the title of Adam Smith’s famous work, The Wealth of Nations, is an allusion to passages from the Bible, such as Isaiah 60:5. Strong forms of the claim of this relationship between Smith and Scripture argue for a direct reliance of the former upon the latter. Weaker forms of the claim merely raise the possibility of the relationship or point more broadly to the significance and relevance of scriptural passages. This article sets these claims against the historical context of Smith and his work, finding that the relationship among “the wealth of nations,” Adam Smith, and English translations of the Bible demonstrates that Smith did not, in fact, allude to the passages in Isaiah. Thus, the rise of political economy itself, of which Smith’s work was an important element, was part of the background for, and preceded the appearance of, the phrase in English bibles.

Charles Coquelin and Jules Dupuit both advocated free banking, but they articulated different views on credit, the note-issuing mechanism, and the role of banking in economic crises. For Coquelin, credit allowed producers to enhance their productive capacities. There was no need to restrict the issuing of banknotes to the quantity of metallic reserves. Coquelin emphasized the role that privileged banks played in the emergence of economic crises. For his part, Dupuit did not believe that credit could create more capital, and warned against the excessive issuing of banknotes. Dupuit considered economic crises to be caused by real factors. I argue that Coquelin’s ideas reflected a credit theory of money while Dupuit’s views were characteristic of a monetary theory of credit.

John Maynard Keynes’s essay “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output” is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labor. I discuss the reasons that prompted Keynes to do so and then examine the consequences of replacing decreasing with non-decreasing returns for the model of effective demand from chapter 3 of the General Theory. I conclude that non-decreasing marginal returns do not sit comfortably with the principle of effective demand. The view that Keynes’s 1939 essay constitutes an important amendment to his General Theory has thus to be put into perspective.

In “On the Concept of ‘Felicitas Publica’ in Eighteenth-Century Political Economy,” a recent paper in this journal, Federico D’Onofrio strongly criticizes the interpretation that Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni have offered of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan tradition of civil economy and public happiness, as articulated by Antonio Genovesi. D’Onofrio claims that Bruni and colleagues have not fully explored the political meaning of public happiness within eighteenth-century economics, and that Bruni unfairly criticized methodological individualism on the basis of the intrinsically social character of happiness. This paper is a reply to D’Onofrio.