The present-day standard textbook narrative on the history of growth theory usually takes Robert Solow’s 1956 contribution as a key starting point, with extensions on the savings decision (done by David Cass and Tjalling Koopmans in 1965) being the next important development. However, such account is historically misleading because it organizes past developments based on theoretical concerns. Our

The rational expectations revolution was not only based on the introduction of Muth’s idea of rational expectations to macroeconomics; the introduction of Muth’s hypothesis cannot explain the more drastic change of the mathematical toolbox and concepts, research strategies, vocabulary, and questions since the 1980s. The main claim is that the shift from “Keynesian economics†to “new classical

The neoclassical synthesis has been defined as a bridge between Keynesian theory and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. The aim of this article is to show that founders of the neoclassical synthesis were not homogenous in their appraisal of the importance of Walrasian theory. To do so, we focus on Robert Solow’s contributions as a case study and examine the history of his lifelong criticism of what

This paper examines how the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) redefined their idea of development over the two decades from 1990, no longer presenting it as only a matter of economic progress but instead focusing more on the problem of poverty and its reduction. This change of definition was closely associated with changes in the preferred measurement of development, from average income (based

Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fall out of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K.T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how

In the context of the recent spread of public and academic concern with economic inequality, this paper examines the evolution of British social democratic thinking about inequality, linking this evolution to the changing debates within economics on this issue. The discussion of the economics of inequality focusses upon the pivotal figure of Tony Atkinson, the most important British economic theorist

John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ is celebrated today as both an important transitional work in his economic theory and for its famously optimistic prediction of a distant future age of leisure, made against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Despite the essay’s acclaim and subsequent scholarly analysis of its arguments, comparatively little attention

The paper investigates the role played by Friedman’s interpretation of the Brazilian inflation in his 1967 formulation of the natural rate hypothesis and in his 1976 discussion of indexation and other institutional arrangements in the face of chronic inflation. It is argued that, as an empirical economist and in the absence of evidence from industrialized countries, Friedman found in the Brazilian

This article explores the basis for the well-known hostility of William Stanley Jevons toward John Stuart Mill, and offers an alternative explanation to those which have hitherto dominated discussion. After reviewing the importance of disagreements over economic doctrine and questions of scientific method, as well as the “psychological dimension” to the hostility, the article makes the case for considering

The paper analyses the reception of the idea of convergence in Soviet economics from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. It is predominantly concerned with convergence theory as a policy idea that inspired perestroika. The paper is related to the literature on ideas and institutional change as pioneered by Peter A. Hall and Mark Blyth. Its central question is: How could, under the conditions of an authoritarian

Jean-Baptiste Say is generally portrayed as an unrelenting champion of laissez faire who believed commercial activity promoted economic well-being. However, I develop a more nuanced portrait of Say’s thinking by showing that he did not believe that free trade was an unmitigated good. He thus identified several exceptions to free international trade that justified government intervention in the form

This survey is written to show historians of economics what is happening in history of econometrics, and is the second survey I did with this aim. The first survey, published in 2011, concluded that interest in the history of econometrics has arisen primarily from within econometrics itself and that its histories have been written mainly by econometricians. After the publication of the first survey

Anniversaries are occasions for remembrance and reflections on one’s history. Many central banks take the occasion of an anniversary to publish books on their history. In this essay we discuss five recent books on the history of central banking and monetary policy. In these volumes, the Great Financial Crisis and the way which it obliged central banks to reinvent themselves occupies an important place

Antonio Genovesi’s economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid- and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi’s book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The aim of

The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas, Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in which the messiness for which such models were later criticized was endorsed as providing enabling modelers to be

In 1976, Robert Lucas explicitly criticized Keynesian macroeconometric models for their inability to correctly predict the effects of alternative economic policies. Today, most contemporary macroeconomists and some historians of economics consider that Lucas’s critique led forcefully to an immediate disqualification of the Keynesian macroeconometric approach. This narrative is based on the interpretation

In the past two decades some of the history of economics turned from histories of economic ideas or economic thought, focusing on the study of “theories” and “schools of thought”, to histories of, for example, epistemic mediators such as “models”, “experiments”, “measurements”, and “observations.” The articles in this special issue show that a change of perspective in historical analysis toward the

History of Political Economy 50:4 DOI 10.1215/00182702-7202548 Copyright 2018 by Duke University Press Correspondence may be addressed to: Douglas Irwin, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755; email: douglas.irwin@dartmouth.edu. I am grateful to Dan Hammond, Steve Medema, David Mitch, Randy Kroszner, and Roy Weintraub for very helpful comments and advice; all errors, interpretations

Little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the three fathers of marginal utility theory, and Karl Menger, whose Vienna Mathematical Colloquium was crucial to the development of mathematical economics. The present paper begins to fill this gap in the literature.

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This paper is a concatenation of the penultimate versions of the first and last chapters of the book Contemporary Historiography of Economics, edited by Duppe and Weintraub, to be published by Routledge Press in late 2018. The volume itself collects commissioned essays on recently developed modes and strategies for writing the history of economics.

We present social network analysis as a complement to other methods in the history of economics. We first discuss why social network analysis is especially promising for the study of the history of recent economics. We then use an example of research using it to highlight some of its characteristics.

On May 28–29, 2010, twelve experimental economists gathered at the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam for a witness seminar on the history of the experiment in economics. Though the witness seminar has been used as an oral method of research in contemporary history and in the history of medicine and technology, this was its first extensive use in the history of economics. My contribution

Historians of economics are helping us understand how economic knowledge is made. In concert with trends from the sociology and history of science, historians meticulously examine the practices of economists. But as they have trained their attention to the scales and sites where those stories are told, historians have lost sight of the travels of knowledge beyond lecture halls and scholarly journal

Robert W. Clower’s article “The Keynesian Counter-Revolution: A Theoretical Appraisal” (1965) was central to the transformation of Keynesian macroeconomics since it contributed to the emergence of fixed-price models, in the 1970s. Despite this influence, no scholar has proposed to explain its origins. My paper aims to fill this gap. It is argued that Clower came to build his disequilibrium program

Robert Triffin (1911-1993) played an important role in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He was known as one of the main advocates of a multipolar international monetary system. In this paper we analyse the origins of riffin’s “regional” approach towards international monetary integration. We argue that Triffin’s experience with the European Payments Union (EPU)played hereby

This article traces a normative turn between the middle of the 1940s and the early 1950s reflected in the reformulation, interpretation, and use of rational choice theories at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. This turn is paralleled by a transition from Jacob Marschak’s to Tjalling Koopmans’s research program. While rational choice theories initially raised high hopes that they would

This question, apparently unproblematic, has been at the center of the development discourse for decades now. Indeed, the first major debate that shaped the discipline—the 1950s balanced-growth versus unbalanced-growth debate—was fought under the rubric of what actually defined development economics as a distinct disciplinary field. Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) famously criticized the theory of balanced

Development economics in the 1950s and 1960s, as Tinbergen and Adelman saw it, was a “groping in the dark.�? Besides the limited knowledge of dynamic mechanisms, the lack of data was a severe problem for any attempt at modeling, whether macroeconomic, input-output or in the tradition of national income accounting. As concerns the three main figures of this paper – the empirical researchers Tinbergen

Recipes for creating development have changed radically since the international community first thought to intervene in such historical processes soon after WWII. During this time, views about how to measure development have also changed dramatically, moving from relatively simple to relatively complex measurement systems. This paper charts these changes using both the oral interview histories and

This paper focuses on Sophie de Grouchy's French translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759-1790), published in 1798 and praised, from the very moment of its publication. It aims at emphasizing Grouchy's reading of Smith's moral philosophy on some particular points as it might have influence her translation of the TMS. Indeed, one important aspect of Grouchy's Lettres, which concerns their

The competition law of the Federal Republic of Germany came into effect on January 1st, 1958, replacing the Allied antitrust regulations that had prevailed since World War II. The passing of the law marked the end of a long debate on the specifics of regulating anti-competitive behavior in which several proposals had been considered by the Federal Parliament (Gerber, 1998, pp. 274-276). On a more fundamental