This paper provides a refutation of the “absolute immizeration” doctrine that S. Hollander attributes to Marx, by emphasizing the Marxian original categories and laws of capitalist production in order to base Marx’s opposition to this doctrine on his more profound opposition to Classics about the law of supply and demand for labor.

The paper proceeds as follows: first, it is shown that the Marxian subsistence wage does not exclude population growth. Second, the analysis of surplus population will reveal how it is not only a condition of the business cycle, but also one of its immediate results. In this sense, the so-called theory of dual labor force, which Hollander uses to discard the role of surplus population in the decreasing real-wage trend, proves a misunderstanding of the origin and nature of the industrial reserve army.

From the labor demand side, on the other hand, the endogeneity of technical progress precludes any “ongoing process” of increasing organic composition of capital. Finally, it will appear that categories of labor power, wages defined as the value of labor power, or laws such as decreasing necessary labor and increasing surplus labor, allow Marx to develop a law of supply and demand for labor partly unrelated to the number of workers and the evolution of population growth, which necessarily rules out any birth-rate control policy.

There are four main approaches to bilateral index number theory: the fixed basket, stochastic, test, and economic approaches. The paper reviews the contributions of Irving Fisher to these approaches to index number theory, which are still in use today. The paper also reviews Fisher’s contributions to multilateral index number theory. The main themes of the paper are developed in the context of a review of the early history of index number theory: a history that conveys a wealth of information and insight into the making and use of index numbers today.

This paper deals with the concept of liquidity in Keynes’ theoretical and political writings. First of all, liquidity, according to Keynes, is a concept much more comprehensive than commonly held nowadays: for Keynes, liquidity means more than an easy convertibility, a high marketability (land might have been highly liquid in ancient times). In short, an asset is highly liquid when its value is weakly dependent on a change in our long-term state of expectations. In a second step, this reassessment of liquidity is applied to Keynes’ political writings, in particular to monetary policy and also to the ‘buffer-stock’ scheme. On the one hand, our investigation shows that in a context of ‘uncertainty,’ monetary policy basically aims to encourage the private sector to have confidence in long-term expectations. Private wealth owners should accordingly ask for lower and lower ‘liquidity premium.’ On the other hand, Keynes’ ‘buffer stocks’ of commodities are not intended for a direct control of prices. Rather, their proper purpose is to confer more liquidity to commodities; i.e., to transform them to ‘monetary assets.’ All in all, monetary policy and buffer-stocks schemes prove to be two basic rationales of Keynes’ concept of liquidity still worth being investigated—today as before.

The translation titled “The Overrated Reason” is based on the German text “Die Überschätzte Vernunft,” by Friedrich Hayek—a lecture that Hayek gave at a symposium at Castle Kleβheim in early 1982.