This paper examines two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the world monetary system, and the two economists, Robert Triffin and Fritz Machlup, who led the charge, one for centralized reserves, and the other for flexible exchange rates. Triffin would later claim that no one did more to ensure that floating exchange rates emerged the winner in the policy debate than Machlup because of his influence on academic economists and policy makers through the Bellagio Group conferences. The Bellagio Group conferences and Machlup’s leadership role are examined.

From the 1920s to the 1980s, Dr. Eveline Mabel Burns made significant contributions to the discipline of economics. During her career, she taught at world-class universities, including the London School of Economics and Columbia University. She published in the fields of labor economics, general economic theory, economic forecasting, methodology, and social security in leading economic journals. In the 1930s, she began her work in establishing the social security system in the United States. Yet, despite this multitude of accomplishments, the work of Eveline Mabel Burns is barely discernible in accounts of the evolution of twentieth-century economics. This essay remedies that neglect by explicating her career and economics. First, it describes her early years as an economist as she determined the ultimate course of her professional career. Second, it outlines the hybrid institutional method of analysis she used. Third, it describes how she made use of this methodology in her work on social security. Finally, it concludes with an interpretation of her neglect in twentieth-century economics that highlights her gender and her use of institutional methods of analysis.

The outspoken social reformer Mary Clare de Graffenreid (born 1849, died 1921) stood out among the handful of early women members of the American Economic Association (founded 1885) as the winner of two essay competitions. In 1889, Clare de Graffrenreid’s essay shared the $100 first prize in an AEA essay competition on child labor, and appeared the following year in the Publications of the American Economic Association (1st series, 5, 2, March 1890, pp. 194–271). In 1891 her essay “The Condition of Wage-Earning Women” (published in Forum 15, March 1893, pp. 68–82) won the $300 first prize in an AEA essay competition on women workers (the $200 second prize went to Helen Campbell’s “Women Wage Earners,” 1893). Her valedictory address at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, in 1865 provided her first taste of public controversy, as the general commanding Union troops in the area responded by placing the college under guard and threatening to close it, but by far the most controversial of her twenty-seven publications was “The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mill” (Century Magazine, February 1891). This paper examines de Graffenreid’s career and contributions, and what her career reveals about the paths for women to participate in the AEA and the American economics profession in the late nineteenth century. After teaching Latin, literature, and mathematics for a decade at Georgetown Female Seminary, de Graffenreid had a non-academic career as an investigator with the Bureau of Labor (from 1888, Department of Labor) from 1886 until she retired in 1906. Despite her AEA prizes, her published lectures to other conferences (YWCA, National Conference of Charities and Correction), and her published testimony to the Industrial Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor, she was never on the program of an AEA meeting. Like other women economists of her time, de Graffenreid crossed boundaries between scholarly research and social reform, and between different scholarly disciplines (e.g., publishing “Some Social Economic Problems” in American Journal of Sociology, 1896). The paper examines how essay competitions provided women such as de Graffenreid and Campbell (and Julie-Victoire Daubié and Clémence Royer in France) with a voice in the predominately male economics profession of the late nineteenth century.

The investigation of aggregate consumption underwent a radical change in the USA during the 1940s and 1950s. Principles deriving from the American Institutionalist tradition attained their greatest popularity in Duesenberry’s formulation just before they were rapidly abandoned. This paper examines this turning point by comparing Duesenberry’s relative income hypothesis and Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis. This also makes it possible to identify a particular feature of Duesenberry’s analysis—its heterogeneity—which must be taken into consideration by those seeking a return to Institutionalist principles in the analysis of aggregate consumption.

This paper discusses the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu (SMD) theorems in general equilibrium theory. It argues that the SMD results were related to the previous literature on the integrability of demand. The integrability question involved rationalizing individual demand functions, and the SMD theorems asked the same question about aggregate (market) excess demand functions. The paper’s two goals are to demonstrate how the SMD results followed naturally from the earlier work on integrability, and to point out that the profession’s reception was quite different; the integrability results were considered a success story, while the SMD results were quite negative.

Oswald ‘Foxy’ Falk was the enigmatic figure who understood, probably more than any other person, how the mind of Maynard Keynes operated. Regrettably, Falk never wrote a memoir on Keynes or even expanded upon his long professional association with him. Equally, there has been relatively little written of Falk in the economics literature. This article attempts, at least, to address that gap. The character and philosophy of Falk are examined through the prism of a lengthy correspondence he had with another businessman who knew Keynes, William Sydney Robinson. Their letters reveal why Keynes fell out with his former business partner but also, more importantly, how, in talking about the great and the good, lesser mortals are inclined to tell the occasional mistruth.

Smith was influenced by Newton’s method. Nonetheless, he introduced elements that led him far from the Newtonian perspective. The present essay analyzes how historical dimensions, contingencies, institutions, and conflicting human inclinations modify a Newtonian horizon. Finally, the paper focuses on how, in Smith’s view, institutions determine “unintended outcomes,” which are sometimes opposed to those of the market. In this sense, the “invisible hand” is not only the result of the behavior of myopic individuals trying to improve their conditions; it is also the outcome of the work of institutions that operate as structures autonomous with respect to individuals.