In the modern lexicon, money is pure instrumentality, a colorless medium that transparently expresses real value. Contrary to that trope, however, we can get “inside” money: we can reconnoiter it as a structure entailing value that is engineered by certain societies. Taking a...

This essay describes the evolution of the Economics of Poverty from the seminal works of Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree to the Rediscovering Era in the 1960's. It shows how the leading objectives of its authors changed over the decades. The description is roughly exhaustive, pointing out the...

This essay describes the evolution of the Economics of Poverty. It shows how the leading objectives of its authors changed over the decades. The description is roughly exhaustive from the end of the nineteenth-century to the quot;rediscovering poverty eraquot; in the 1960s. After that, it...

Nearly a half-century before the financial crisis of 2008, there was another time when reforming the world monetary system was on everyone’s lips and many academics and policy makers were developing and attempting to promote plans for its reconstruction before illiquidity, speculation and loss...

Robert Triffin (1911-1993) was one of the main protagonists in the international monetary debates in the postwar period. He became famous with his book Gold and the Dollar Crisis, published in 1960, in which he predicted the end of the Bretton Woods system. In his analysis there, Triffin was...

The International Seminar on Macroeconomics (ISoM) is an annual conference, which was co-sponsored, during 15 years (1978-1993) by the French EHESS and the NBER. This article uncovers the scientific and institutional dynamics unrolling from this cooperation. The ISoM, we argue, constituted a...

The citation for Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize of 1976 points to three contributions. In two cases, the principal works the Committee must have had in mind are easy to identify. The question of what was intended by the third – ‘his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy' –...

The idea of measuring scientific relevance by counting citations is gaining ever-growing consensus among economists, and thanks to the electronic bibliographic resources now available the procedure has become relatively simple and fast. However, when it comes to putting the idea into practice...