As usually understood, the significant debate over the founding of the Fed was between advocates of the real bills doctrine and advocates of the quantity theory of money. This understanding however conflates two different distinctions: one between the banking principle and the currency...

Macroeconomic models often assume that the choices of all the diverse agents in one sector—consumers for example—can be considered as the choices of one "representative" standard utility maximizing individual whose choices coincide with the aggregate choices of the heterogeneous individuals....

This paper reports the findings of a survey and interviews with graduate students at seven top-ranking graduate economics programs. It finds that over the last 15 years graduate economics programs have become more empirical, less mathematical and less theoretically oriented, and that the...

Economists generally divide economics into two distinct categories—positive and normative—but how applied economics fits within these categories is unclear. This paper argues that applied economics belongs in neither normative nor positive economics; instead it belongs in a third...

This paper is a discussion of the changes in the economics profession that occurred (or at least are suggested will occur) between 2000 and 2050. Structural changes include the growth of virtual universities, the movement of the center of economics out of the U.S. and the shrinking of...

This paper explains that the AS/AD model as currently presented in the tests is seriously flawed. It does not fulfill the minimum requirement of a model: logical consistency. Its component parts are derived from models that reflect different, and inconsistent, models of the economy. Moreover,...

In this article, I discuss some earlier debates about the foundations of utility and its measurement, focusing on the contributions of Francis Y. Edgeworth (1845-1926), a famous British economist who was a leader in the development of a more mathematically structured economics in the late 1800s,...