Marshall?s early encounter with the problems of knowledge shaped his attitude to both the method and content of economics. Theorists should avoid long chains of reasoning in favour of close contact with reality, and recognise that economic progress depends on the growth of knowledge through the...

Schumpeterian 'development from within' requires imagination, skill and motivation; so does Cattaneo's 'psychology of wealth'. Neither can be encompassed by models that rely on deductive rationality, but are twin products of Knightian uncertainty, where the absence of demonstrably correct...

The emergence and delayed influence of Coase's ideas demonstrate the role of unpredictability and path dependence in the creation of knowledge and the recognition of its implications. Coase's approach to the operation of firms and markets was not readily accommodated in a theoretical vision of...

LET ME BEGIN WITH TWO EPISODES TAKEN FROM A FASCINATING account of British scientific intelligence in the war of 1939-45, Most Secret War by R. V. Jones. In early April 1940 a British reconnaissance aircraft took photographs of Bremen harbor which showed it full of shipping. Unfortunately the...