For aesthetic, strategic and pragmatic reasons, E. T. Jaynes (2003, Appendix A) objects to Bruno de Finetti’s founding of probability theory on the basis of the notion of coherence. In this paper an attempt is made to diffuse this critique, as well as to point out, briefly, that these, and the...

The Hahn-Banach Theorem plays a crucial role in the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics. To date, all mathematical economics and advanced general equilibrium textbooks concentrate on using nonconstructive or incomputable versions of this celebrated theorem. In this paper we argue for...

Arguably, of the many pioneering classics authored by Milton Friedman, it is his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, in December, 1967, published as The Role of Monetary Policy in the AEA, in March, 1968, that may have had the greatest impact in serious policy circles. In...

Hugh Hudson’s classic article on A Model of the Trade Cycle has never, to the best of our knowledge, received the serious attention it deserved (and deserves, even now, 55 years after its original publication). It was written in what we would like to call the classic Hicks-Kaldor mode, i.e.,...

The theory of economic policy, in its mathematical modes, may be said to have had two incarnations, identified in terms of pre-Lucasian and ultra-Lucasian on a time-scale, whose origin can be traced to the Scandinavian works of the 1920s and early 1930s, beginning with Lindahl (1924, 1929),...