The role of traveling as a source of discovery and development of new ideas has been controversial in the history of economics. Despite their protective attitude toward established theory, economists have traveled widely and gained new insights or asked new questions as a result of their exposure to “other” economic systems, ideas, and forms of behavior. That is particularly the case when they travel to new places while their frameworks are in their initial stages or undergoing changes. This essay examines economists’ traveling as a potential source of new hypotheses, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a detailed case study of Douglass North’s 1961 travel to Brazil.

Italy entered the war in May 1915; the USA, in April 1917. One hundred years on, this paper examines the viewpoint of Antonio de Viti de Marco, the renowned Italian economist who was one of the founders of the pure theory of public finance. It first focuses on De Viti’s interpretation of the economic and political aspects of the Great War, and reconstructs his vision of the world conflict as a struggle between liberal democracies and authoritarian states. Second, the paper highlights the convergence of De Viti’s ideals with those of President Wilson, seen as the powerful international leader of the Italian democratic interventionists. It also clarifies that the “Wilsonianism” of this movement originated in the Italian Risorgimento, and suggests that this convergence was not coincidental. Finally, it shows how, after the war, the unconditional admiration De Viti felt for the American positions gave way to bitter disappointment.

This paper reconsiders the anteriority of Robert Torrens’s theory of natural wage to that of David Ricardo. Ricardo was influenced by Torrens’s thinking when writing the chapter on “Wages” of the Principles. For many historians of economic thought, this influence is limited to Torrens’s focus on the socio-cultural aspect of necessity goods, which determine the natural price of labor. While this interpretation is consistent with that of Ricardo, we argue that the anteriority of Torrens to Ricardo more generally focuses on the method used by the latter to justify the indexation of money wages on the money price of subsistence goods. Finally, this paper shows that the tribute paid to Torrens by Ricardo paradoxically explains posterity’s misunderstanding of his theory.

Jean-Baptiste Say’s notion of débouchés has not been correctly understood, due to the lack of proper context within the framework of his broader political economy. We revisit Say’s writings on this topic, retrace the concept’s evolution, and lay out a framework that better illustrates the essence of Say’s thinking. We argue that Say’s theories on money and economic crises are much richer and more sophisticated than the traditional interpretation of Say’s Law would suggest. Say himself acknowledged that his monetary theory contradicted his initial articulations of the law, a point often missed by contemporary observers. This essay paints a more complete picture of Say’s work, showing how monetary changes could, under his framework, affect real variables. In so doing, it cuts against the many simplistic interpretations that pervade the existing literature on the subject.

This paper examines the role of the English economist Arthur (A. J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-rate change/unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’s 1958 paper and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation, and his later work on inflation have received much less. Here, the focus is on redressing this situation somewhat by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’s paper, and what differences there are to it. We also consider this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’s analysis and, in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work.

Employing different meanings of classical concepts of saving, capital, investment, and money, and incorrectly attributing the assumption of full employment of labor and a world of certainty to classical analysis, John Maynard Keynes ([1936] 1974) faulted Say’s Law as irrelevant to the real world. Roy Grieve (2016) ignores previous clarifications of Keynes’s misrepresentations and misunderstandings of John Stuart Mill’s restatements of the law. He employs similar misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s explanations as Keynes did. His model of Mill’s analysis is incapable of explaining how variations in relative prices, the value of money, and interest rates coordinate production, consumption, and savings decisions in a monetary economy.