Psychologist Harry Helson (1898–1977) developed Adaptation-Level (AL) theory during the 1930s to the 1970s, while economics was being refined through ordinalism and expected utility theory. This essay accounts for the process of transmission of AL theory from psychophysics to behavioral psychology and eventually economics. It explains how the concept of adaptation reflectance, originally intended to explain color vision, developed into an experimental approach that caught the attention of both psychologists and economists working on welfare analysis and behavioral research. It also argues that the history of AL theory—so far, absent from narratives about economics and psychology—is worth exploring in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the two disciplines.

John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of the Great Depression has strong parallels to recent theorizing about the post-2008 Great Recession. There are also remarkable similarities between the two historical episodes: the collapse of demand for new fixed investment, the role of the zero lower bound liquidity trap in hampering conventional monetary policy, the multi-year period of near-zero short-term rates, and the protracted period of subnormal prosperity. A major difference between then and now is that monetary authorities in the recent situation actively pursued an unconventional policy with massive purchases of long-term securities. Keynes couldn’t convince authorities of his era to pursue such a plan, but it was precisely the monetary policy he advocated for a depressed economy stuck at the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates.

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.

The paper draws on Stephen Siegel (1984) to argue that, while paving the way for constitutionalizing the free market in Lochner v. New York (1905), the reproduction cost method that the Supreme Court established in Smyth v. Ames (1898) as the preferred technique for assessing the value of a business for regulatory purposes also exposed the conventional character of any valuation exercise, against the claims of objectivity made by classical economists and mainstream jurists. The inconsistency between recognizing that “value is not a fact” and the classical laissez-faire philosophy underlying the Court’s jurisprudence did not escape progressive critics, who concluded that government could legitimately fine-tune regulation in order to affect a business’s value and pursue alternative socio-economic goals.

The article discusses François Quesnay’s dynamics of capital accumulation. First, we analyze the notion of bon prix to highlight the central analytical role played by profits in Quesnay’s growth dynamics. This leads us to challenge Ronald Meek’s interpretation ([1962] 2003) and to (re)propose Peter Groenewegen’s suggestion (1974 and 1983) that profits are not included in the net product for policy reasons. We also show that profits display features resembling a stable income component such as supervision wages (see Marx [1863] 1963). Second, we contest Steven Pressman’s argument (1994, pp. 143–154) that Quesnay missed the distinction between nominal and real variables by modeling how the farmers’ monetary interest (and profit) initiates the capital accumulation process (see Vaggi 1985), which over time leads to an increase of the (physical) surplus rate and thus of the net product in real terms.

Ralph G. Hawtrey was not a man of the backwaters. Through the parallel study of Treasury files and Hawtrey’s scholarly publications, this work reveals his direct influence upon the most commanding minds of the Treasury and the Bank of England, the two institutions that, after WWI, shared primary responsibility over the British austerity agenda. After the war, Hawtrey advocated drastic budgetary and monetary rigor in the name of price stabilization. From 1922, Hawtrey admitted the need to decrease the bank rate; yet he remained an adamant supporter of the gold standard, insisting on its maintenance even if it required further monetary revaluation. Hawtrey’s policy prescriptions stemmed directly from his economic model. The “crowding-out argument,” the centrality of credit and of savings, together with the operational priority of technocratic institutions, were essential theoretical underpinnings of Hawtrey’s agenda: implementing the so-called Treasury view.

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 deals with a debate among Ralph George Hawtrey, John Richard Hicks, and John Maynard Keynes concerning the capacity of the central bank to influence the short-term and the long-term rates of interest. Both Hawtrey and Keynes considered the central bank’s ability to influence short-term rates of interest. However, they do not put the same emphasis on the study of the long-term rates of interest. According to Keynes, long-term rates are influenced by future expected short-term rates (1930, 1936), whereas for Hawtrey ([1932] 1962, 1937, 1938), long-term rates are more dependent on the business cycle. Short-term rates do not have much effect on long-term rates, according to Hawtrey. In 1939, Hicks enters the controversy, giving credit to both Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s theories, and also introducing limits to the operations of arbitrage. He thus presented a nuanced view.

Many commentators have pointed out the presence of a tension, even a contradiction or inconsistency, between two theses advanced by Friedrich Hayek: that the growth of institutions ought to be spontaneous rather than consciously designed, and that the conscious design of a constitution is necessary, so as to secure a desirable social order. Our paper shows via textual analysis that, far from being irreconcilable, these two theses, on the contrary, complement each other.

John Maynard Keynes consistently offered qualified endorsement of Abba Lerner’s “functional finance” doctrine—the qualifications particularly turning on Keynes’s attentiveness to policy management of the psychology of the debt market. This article examines Keynes’s understanding of the possible influence of public debt on interest rates, from 1930 forward. With the multiplier a mechanism whereby debt-financed public investment generates matching private saving (net of private investment) plus public saving, it becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that increasing public debt need not place upward pressure on the level of interest rates, so long as policy can successfully manage the psychology of the debt market. This particularly concerns long interest rates and hence the term structure of rates. His theory of the term structure enables Keynes’s conviction that policy can manage and shape long rates. The conclusion considers also whether Keynes’s caution concerning public debt and interest rates retains relevance today.

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.

In this paper we examine the criticism that Knut Wicksell advanced against Léon Walras’s treatment of capital and interest at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the views of two distinguished followers of Walras concerning the points raised by the Swedish economist. As regards the first aspect, it should be noted that the criticism put forward by Wicksell at that time refers to the earlier editions of the Éléments, in which circulating capital is excluded from the analysis. We thus endeavor to clarify Wicksell’s remarks on the consequences of that exclusion for both the representation of the social production process and the determination of the interest rate. As to the second aspect, our discussion indicates that the appropriate way of treating the capitalistic element of production was an unsettled issue within the small circle of Walras’s followers at the end of the nineteenth century.

The aim of this essay is to assess James Medbery MacKaye’s contribution to socialist thought during the Progressive Era. Largely forgotten today, MacKaye proposed a special version of socialism, which he called “Pantocracy,” based on a peculiar blend of utilitarian and eugenic assumptions. Specifically, MacKaye held that biological fitness mapped to the capacity for happiness—biologically superior individuals possess a greater capacity for happiness—and saw the eugenic breeding of “a being or race of beings capable in the first place of happiness” as a possibility open by the advent of Pantocracy. Incidentally, this essay provides further evidence that the influence of eugenic and racialist beliefs upon the American Progressive Era political economy was so deep-rooted and pervasive that it did cut across traditional ideological boundaries.

The interdisciplinary project to unite the field of mathematics with the social and biological sciences marks the work of Vito Volterra, one of Italy’s most prominent mathematicians of the twentieth century. This paper explores the connections between Volterra’s 1901 inaugural address at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and the work of two of his contemporaries, Léon Walras and Irving Fisher. All three thinkers were ardent advocates of the mathematical turn in economic thinking. This paper argues, however, that it is the previously unexplored relationship between Volterra and Fisher that sheds the most light on the way in which mechanical physics contributed to the project of mathematization within economics more generally. Furthermore, it explores the way in which mathematical inquiry postulated a new and coherent abstraction of the economy, at the same time that it gave epistemological authority to the economist.

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.

Analogies with rational mechanics played a pivotal role in the search for formal models in economics. In the period between the two world wars, a small group of mathematical economists tried to extend this view from statics to dynamics. The main result was the extensive application of calculus of variations to obtain a dynamic representation of economic variables. This approach began with the contributions put forward by Griffith C. Evans, a mathematician who, in the first phase of his scientific career, published widely in economics. Evans’s research was further developed by his student Charles Roos. At the international level, this dynamic approach found its main followers in Italy, within the Paretian tradition. During the 1930s, Luigi Amoroso, the leading exponent of the Paretian School, made major contributions, along with his student Giulio La Volpe, that anticipated the concept of temporary equilibrium. The analysis of the application of the calculus of variations to economic dynamics in the interwar period raises a set of questions on the application of mathematics designed to study mechanics and physics to economics.

The Ricardian dynamics are based on the study of the order of cultivation when demand increases. Piero Sraffa criticized David Ricardo for having assumed that the incoming method is defined by a natural order, and stressed that the law of succession of methods is based on a profitability criterion. Then, in the case of intensive cultivation, the question is whether the incoming method is indeed more productive than the one it replaces. Sraffa’s argument relies on the positivity of rent. However, there is a flaw in his reasoning, and a failure of the Ricardian dynamics is possible. Post-Sraffian scholars have misunderstood that construction and have substituted a static approach for it. The critiques they address to Sraffa are better understood by returning to Ricardo and Sraffa’s own methodology. Fifty years ago, mathematicians rediscovered Ricardo’s approach independently and worked out a powerful algorithm inspired by it.

This article examines the early regulation of futures markets in the 1920s and 1930s. We contrast the analysis of speculation developed by the Grain Futures Administration (GFA) with Holbrook Working’s. Within the GFA we focus on Paul Mehl, who directed the statistical analysis of order flows, trade volumes, and positions that supported the GFA’s policy recommendations. In retrospect Working was the most prominent academic analyst of futures markets. The relationship between the GFA and Working was complex and at times intimately collaborative, but the New Deal provoked sharp disagreement. Working rejected the tighter trading rules advocated by the GFA as counterproductive and tried to persuade the Secretary of Agriculture to embrace a discretionary approach to regulation based upon his analysis of neighboring futures prices (the Working curve) and his distinctive conception of “perfect markets”—a nuanced version of the subsequent efficient market hypothesis.

Austrian capital theory tried to capture the intuitive and basically undeniable importance that time plays in economic life, but arguably was diverted down a blind alley with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s average period of production, a purely physical measure of ‘roundaboutness’—the length of the production process. For the general case, such a measure is a chimera. But the intuition is strong, and the idea survived and reappeared at various points in the history of capital theory. Almost unknown to economists, an alternative value measure of roundaboutness has existed at least since John Hicks’s formulation of his average period (AP) in 1939, which, coincidentally, was exactly the same measure discovered by the financial actuary Frederick Macaulay in 1938, called by him “Duration” (D). Macaulay’s D, more richly interpreted as Hicks’s AP, is a measure that more appropriately captures what it was that the Austrians struggled to express over many years in their capital theory and in their analysis of the business cycle.

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.