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.

This paper aims to detail Frisch’s choice of setting the accelerator principle at the core of his impulse-propagation model (1933a), referred to as the “rocking horse model.” The innovative aspects of this model rest not only on the rise of macrodynamics regarding the equilibrium concept but also on the reformulation of business cycles in terms of production of capital goods. This is a deliberate choice, which relies on his work on business cycles started in 1927, and can be obviously traced back to his debate with John Maurice Clark and the American Institutionalists, but relies more deeply on a specific appropriation of Norwegian approach to this principle.

The piece begins with the proposition that the economic perspective on human activity must reflect the fact that human beings transact in a world defined for the actors by social norms. An analysis of the crisis of 2008 is offered as a demonstration of the value of adopting such a broader perspective. Part II offers an historical model based on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy of such a broader analysis. The piece closes with the case that the history of ideas offers alternative perspectives on the questions we explore in economics today, and thus can serve as a valuable resource for constructive skepticism of the current discourse.

One of the pivotal moments in the move toward mathematizing economics occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, with Leon Walras as perhaps its most ardent champion. Yet, there is no small irony here, in that the leading French mathematicians to whom Walras turned to buttress and defend the case for a mathematical economics, especially Henri Poincare and Emile Picard, laid out reservations to the scope of this mathematizing program. They even pointed to matters, including the hold of the past on future events and hysteresis, a subject already in the discourse of mathematical physicists, which might have fashioned economics differently from the neoclassical mold being formed. This alternate pathway, though, was not pursued at the time.

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.

In 1971, Joan Robinson entered into a debate with the American neoclassical economist C.E. Ferguson in the Canadian Journal of Economics over the efficacy of the neoclassical theory of capital in light of the Cambridge Controversies raging at the time. Recent archival evidence from the Martin Bronfenbrenner Papers at Duke Archive has uncovered a heretofore lost reply Ferguson wrote to Robinson on or around September 1971, three months before his death. That reply is published for the first time as an Appendix to this article. Uncovering this reply, as well as correspondence between Ferguson, Bronfenbrenner, and Solow, shines a light into the American neoclassical camp of the late 1960s and early 1970s as the early phase in the Cambridge Controversies was drawing to a close.

This paper exhaustively examines all Adam Smith’s references to “machines,” including machine metaphors or analogies, with a view to a comprehensive interpretation of the significance of the machine in his thought as a whole. By bringing together all Smith’s references to machines (and variants of that term), as well as his references to related phenomena, mechanics and engines (and variants), the totality of the various different kinds of uses of these terms assists in clarifying the meaning of each of them. However, this exercise is undertaken particularly with a view to the significance of machines in Smith’s political economy.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct and evaluate, among other issues, Hawtrey’s social philosophy.

Hawtrey’s system as a whole is composed of the two distinct and yet interrelated subsystems: philosophy and social philosophy. The former has three components: the theory of evolution and rationalization; the theory of aspects; and Moorean ethics. The latter has two components: his conception of society in general; and his perception of capitalistic economy as one type of society.

We then examine three problematic elements connected with Hawtrey’s system: epistemology in Hawtrey and Moore; plus products and the market; and the ruler and the public.

The paper discusses the influence of Pareto’s methodological revolution on the Italian scientific tradition in public finance. To that end, the works of the most celebrated scholars from within the first, second, and final generations of this tradition are reviewed with reference to their reactions to Pareto’s idea of science as logico-experimental activities, and his contributions to the development of marginalism and theoretical sociology. The particular scholars considered across the three generations’ time span include Pantaleoni, De Viti, Barone, Einaudi, Sensini, Griziotti, Borgatta, Murray, and Fasiani. The main original contribution of this paper is the marshaling of evidence in support of the author’s proposition that Fasiani’s research program is characterized by a clearly Paretian mode of enquiry with regard to methodology and the economic investigation of fiscal activities, although the specific influence of Pareto’s sociology on Fasiani’s approach to fiscal studies was relatively modest. It is provisionally concluded that, in taking the best and most relevant of Pareto’s work for fiscal studies, Fasiani’s contributions came to represent the highest point in the evolution of the general theory of public finance in the Italian tradition.

To this day, the so-called Arrow–Debreu model represents a trademark of rigorous economic research—be it as a benchmark for extending the model, for weakening its assumptions, for structuring data sets, or for providing alternative models. But who should earn the credit? Arrow or Debreu? This essay presents “the making of” Arrow’s and Debreu’s joint article of 1954 as documented in their extensive letter exchange between their first contact in February 1952 and submission in May 1953. I show, pivotally, that Arrow and Debreu did not share the same interest in their work, that they played different roles, and drew different lessons from it. Moreover, neither Arrow nor Debreu can be identified with the way the profession would later refer to the Arrow–Debreu model. To the contrary, both, in their own ways, sought to counter what others perceived as limitations when placing their hopes in the model.

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.

Dumping actions and anti-dumping policies were regularly on the political agenda for several years in the pre-World War I period in Europe and the United States. In Italy, politics, economic circles, and scholars were engaged in debate on whether to protect sensitive industries threatened by sales below cost in their home markets, practiced by foreign competitors. Einaudi and his school of economics tackled the issue with several publications. In this paper we focus on Jannaccone’s essays, which he contributed to both a symposium in Riforma sociale in March 1914 and an issue in Rivista delle società commerciali in June 1914. Although we recognize that Viner (1923) theoretically systematized dumping in the wider framework of international trade, we nevertheless claim that the theoretical origin of dumping, in a context of imperfect competition, was Jannaccone’s essay. We show that Jannaccone proposed an early theory of dumping as an instance of the more general theory of price discrimination. He defined and classified dumping; he developed a static analysis of its profitability; he investigated the effects of dumping in both domestic and foreign markets; and he analyzed the effect of protectionism and its policy implications.

Nicolas Dutot (1684–1741) is an important figure for the history of economic thought, as a pioneer in monetary theory and price statistics, and for economic history, as a chronicler of John Law’s System. Yet, until recently, very little information about him was known, some of it incorrect. I present extensive research that reveals a remarkable career rising from humble origins and full of surprises. He spent his formative years in the ranks of the “ancienne finance” he was thought to despise, and then worked for the Chamber of Justice that he so decried in his writings, only to be sent to the Bastille for corruption. After working for Law’s Bank and then retiring quite comfortably, he continued to socialize with his pre-System financier and banker friends, at least for a while. He also joined a short-lived learned society and accumulated a substantial library that reveals much about his tastes and affinities. The portrait that emerges is at odds with the image of an honest accountant he tried to project, but also richer and more engaging.

This paper discusses the historical changes in economic and ideological conditions through which greed turned from one of the deadly sins into a passion from which society derived social benefits. Adding to the perspective developed by Hirschman in his The Passions and the Interests, three stages are distinguished in the construction of the notion of the social utility of greed: (1) the self-sufficient community; (2) the mercantile state; and (3) commercial society. The paper relates how changing conditions led philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to recognize the conditional usefulness of greed and, eventually, to build a dream on the idea of greed as instrumental in establishing the material foundation of progress in society.

The article analyzes the economic entries of the main Spanish general encyclopedias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Diccionario enciclopédico (1887–1898) and Enciclopedia universal (1908–1930). Both works include the contributions of prestigious Spanish and Latin American intellectuals, and were designed for distribution in Spain and Latin American markets. Diccionario enciclopédico was the first to introduce the “social question” in its economic entries, which were drafted by the most outstanding Spanish economists at the time. These entries were characterized by the absence of any significant mention of historicism and marginalism, which illustrates the isolationism of Spanish economists during the late nineteenth century. Enciclopedia universal, on the other hand, was not entirely drafted by academic economists. Nevertheless, its economic entries account for a complete outline of marginalism, Marxism, and historicism. Apart from the traditional goals of compiling the intellectual advances made in any area of human knowledge for educational purposes, the economic entries of both encyclopedias aimed at popularizing some kind of economic knowledge in order to prepare minds for the reception of specific doctrines and agendas: the secular social doctrine of Spanish Krausism and the religious Social Catholicism, respectively.

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.

Econophysics presents itself as a new paradigm and a new specialty (or even a discipline) using various models and concepts imported from condensed matter and statistical physics to analyze economic and financial phenomena. Given that econophysics is based on different fundamental assumptions from those of mainstream economics, the disciplinary position of econophysics is not so clear. In this perspective, this paper will analyze the progressive institutionalization of econophysics using bibliometric methods to identify core authors as well as the structure of the disciplines with which econophysics is closely related.

The integration of money into the Walrasian general equilibrium scheme is an age-old and intricate issue. One of the first attempts was made by Gustavo Del Vecchio, who, in the early twentieth century, built a theory of circulation that considered money as a medium of exchange, and investigated its organizational and social aspects in depth. Del Vecchio developed a theory of monetary service grounded on the distinction between individual and social utility of money. Moreover, he stated that money, credit, accumulation, and crisis could no longer be theorized with time omitted, and this induced him to formulate dynamic statements that put forward claims about money as a store of value. The organizational and social dimensions of money, time, and uncertainty were all important and interconnected aspects in Del Vecchio’s scientific inquiry, for they all sprang from his conceptualization of money as a medium of exchange.

The notion of interdependent preferences has a long history in economic thought. In its general form, it can be found in the works of authors such as Hume, Rae, Genovesi, Smith, Marx, and Mill, among others. In the twentieth century, the idea became more widespread mainly through the works of Veblen and Duesenberry. Recently, an increasing number of theorists are interested in issues such as reference income, relative consumption, and positional goods, which are all based on the concept of interdependent preferences. However, such preferences were never part of the corpus of orthodox theory. For instance, although Pareto and Marshall were aware of their existence, they did not advocate their incorporation into orthodox economic theory. This paper argues that the structure of mainstream economic methodology and the challenging theoretical implications of adopting interdependent preferences were two possible reasons for the mainstream rejection. The discussion includes the more recent orthodox attitudes towards such preferences.