A critique is advanced of the contention of Obstfeld and Rogoff (1983) that in a fiat money regime, 'speculative hyperinflations can be excluded only through severe restrictions' on preferences. It is maintained here, in contrast, that no more than the infinity of the marginal utility of real...

The paper advances an answer to a puzzle: Why is any lending or borrowing done in terms of money, when such money debt exposes the lenders’ wealth to inflation risk? The ‘received’ answer to this question is that money bonds are just proxies for real bonds, proxies born of insufficient...

This paper develops a model of the costliness of inflation that places the locus of costs in the bond market, rather than the money market. It argues that inflation is costly on account on the contraction of the bond market caused by the riskiness of inflation. The theory is premised upon the...

Australia is notably, if not notoriously, a land of much space but few people. Its population density is, correspondingly, almost the lowest of any country in the world: only Namibia and Mongolia record a lower figure. Australia’s extreme divergence from the common human experience has been a...

The paper interprets the neoliberalism' of Friedman, Hayek (and others), as a partly successful doctrinal reformulation of 'historical liberalism' that certain material realities had by the mid-20th century proved solvent of. It argues that in the post-War period it was the doctrinal...

The paper addresses one of the disappointments that the liberal has faced intermittently over the past two hundred years: the apparent lack of relish by the public at large for democracy.

Keynes famously claimed 'soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interested which are dangerous for good or evil'. His neoliberal critics have frequently concurred with this contention, and have happily used the example of Keynes to illustrate it. But is 'the power of ideas' consistent with...

Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics brings together contributions from eminent authors who, building on Darwin's own insights and on developments in evolutionary theory, offer challenging views on how economics can use evolutionary ideas effectively.

In a well-known paper Friedman and Savage (1948) advocated a utility function in which the marginal utility of wealth is increasing in wealth above some critical level of wealth. In order to win a reception for this novel conception of the utility function Friedman and Savage took some pains in...