This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a “bad” equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to...

Following Mittermaier's search for "the hand behind the invisible hand" and using some results of my research on the so-called Lausanne school, this article attempts to discuss the two very different invisible hands behind Walras' and Pareto's respective version of general equilibrium. Unlike...

This short paper presents the Marxian value theory and its contradiction. As an alternative Marginalism is introduced and it is shown that marginal cost is equal to the monetary expression of marginal labour value. Marginal labour value is proportional to the price

Milton Friedman is usually regarded as an instrumentalist on the basis of his infamous claim that economic theories are to be judged by their predictions and not by the realism of their assumptions. This interpretation sits oddly with Friedman's empirical work - e.g., Friedman and Schwartz''s...

The paper argues that much of the theoretical work on consumer choice theory during the first third of the twentieth century actually addressed some of the same issues discussed in contemporary behavioral economics. This is not generally recognized because the discussion was tied up with the...

Frank H. Knight's classic, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, became a standard textbook and reference for students at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and elsewhere from the 1930s until at least the 1950s. Knight never published new or revised editions...

This paper is the penultimate version of the Prologue to my book Measuring Utility. From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press in the series Oxford Studies in the History of Economics

In this chapter I review the contributions to utility theory that Paul Samuelson made when he was a PhD student at Harvard, from the first scientific papers he began writing in 1936 to the dissertation he submitted in November 1940. Based on this review, I make three points: (1) After exploring...

This paper documents an exchange between Leonard Savage, founder of the subjective probability approach to decision-making, and Karl Popper, advocate of the so-called propensity approach to probability, of which there is no knowledge in the literature on probability theory. Early in 1958, just...