Early in the 18th century, before the birth of political economy as a discipline, two of the earliest novels in the English language were published: Robinson Crusoe (1719) by writer and economic entrepreneur Daniel Defoe, and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by the cleric and political adviser...

Richard Cantillon and David Hume both propose the theory of monetary non-neutrality, whereby the money supply changes through the money balances of specific individuals. Such an uneven distribution of monetary change then spreads throughout the economy step by step and changes relative prices....

Nicolas Dutot (1684-1741) is an important figure for the history of economic thought, as a pioneer in monetary theory and price statistics, and for economic history as a chronicler of John Law's System. Yet until recently very little about him was known, some of it incorrect. I present extensive...

Mit seinem Hauptwerk "Political Arithmetick" legte William Petty die Grundlage der modernen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsstatistik und der soziologischen Sozial-Berichterstattung. Sein Begriff der "politischen Arithmetik" konnte sich allerdings gegen den vom europäischen Kontinent stammenden Begriff...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

Friedman's book on the Óƒonsumption FunctionÔ is one of the great works of Economics demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to major policy implications. We present a short review of Friedman's Permanent Income Hypothesis, the origins of the...

Ragnar Frisch's concept of econometrics was broader in scope than the more restricted connotation it has today as a sub-discipline of economics, it may be more properly rendered as a reconstruction of economics along principles inspired and drawn from natural sciences. In this reconstruction an...

By revisiting Scitovsky's work on well-being, which introduces 'novelty' into the consumer's option set as a peculiar source of satisfaction, this paper finds a number of connections with the recent behavioural economics so as to open new lines on inquiry. First, similarly to behavioural...

Scitovsky is known as a forerunner of behavioural economics simply because he drew heavily on psychology and claimed that people's choices may be "joyless" (Scitovsky, The joyless economy, 1976). However, a careful reformulation of his analysis shows that he anticipated a number of insights...

In this paper, we attempt to show why the importance of relational goods compared to conventional goods and status goods threatens to decline in contemporary societies. In our point of view, the development of the relative significance of these three types of goods is not a consequence of...