In this paper, we build on data on officials of the Federal Reserve System, oral history repositories, and hitherto underresearched archival sources to unpack the tortuous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. We show that growing attention to new macroeconomic research was a reaction to both mounting external criticisms against the Fed’s decision-making process and the spread of new macroeconomic theories and econometric techniques. We argue that the rise of the number of PhD economists working at the Fed is a symptom rather than a cause of this transformation. Key to our story are a handful of economists from the Board of Governors’ Division of Research and Statistics (DRS) who did not hold a PhD but envisioned their role as going beyond mere data accumulation and got involved in large-scale macroeconometric model building. We conclude that the divide between PhD and non-PhD economists may not be fully relevant to understand both the shift in the type of economics practiced at the Fed and the uses of this knowledge in the decision-making process. Equally important was the rift between different styles of economic analysis.

The late nineteenth century saw the multiplication of statistical studies on Jewish populations. This literature is now known as “Jewish Statistics” or “Jewish Social Science” (JSS). This article focuses on the articles published in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal for Demography and Statistics of the Jews, ZDSJ). The ZDSJ was the main journal in JSS and appeared from 1905 until 1931.

Existing scholarship on JSS has either focused on the influence of Zionism (Hart 2000) or eugenics and race theory (Efron 1994). This article proposes to relate JSS to the history of economics and statistics. As is suggested by the intellectual profile of the main contributors to the ZDSJ, we argue that JSS was a by-product of the German historical school in economics. Though JSS was intended for a mostly Jewish audience, its organization and methods were clearly inspired by those of German economists.

In this article, I argue that looking at lesser known intellectuals can help the history of economics to uncover new ways of seeing the world. My focus is the beginnings of “Indian economics” and its conceptualization of development. The Indian economists, despite their elite status in India, were from an imperial context where they were never considered economists. Studies throughout the twentieth century continued to treat them only as nationalists, rarely as contributors to economic knowledge. My research gives agency to these economists. I show how the position of Indian economics from the margins of discursive space offered a unique perspective that enabled it to innovate at the margins of development discourse. Indian economics redefined the concept of universality in the existing nineteenth-century idea of development by rejecting the widely accepted comparative advantage model and assertion that progress originated in Europe. Moreover, the economists pushed for universal industrialization, even for imperial territories, arguing that universal progress was beneficial to all.

This paper explores archival material concerning the reception of Leonard J. Savage’s foundational work of rational choice theory in its subjective-Bayesian form. The focus is on the criticism raised in the early 1960s by Daniel Ellsberg, William Fellner, and Cedric Smith, who were supporters of the newly developed subjective approach but could not understand Savage’s insistence on the strict version he shared with Bruno de Finetti. The episode is well known, thanks to the so-called Ellsberg Paradox and the extensive reference made to it in current decision theory. But Savage’s reaction to his critics has never been examined. Although Savage never really engaged with the issue in his published writings, the private exchange with Ellsberg and Fellner, and with de Finetti about how to deal with Smith, shows that Savage’s attention to the generalization advocated by his correspondents was substantive. In particular, Savage’s defense of the normative value of rational choice theory against counterexamples such as Ellsberg’s did not prevent him from admitting that he would give careful consideration to a more realistic axiomatic system, should the critics be able to provide one.

This article questions the articulation between John Stuart Mill’s initial project of creating a new science dedicated to the means of improving individual character, a science named “ethology,” and the treatise of political economy that he published instead. My claim is that his defense of free competition as well as some of the arguments he opposes to it, and which have often puzzled his readers, actually reveal the moral agenda of his political economy and of some of his political principles, specifically his ambivalent position towards paternalism.

Frank D. Graham (1890–1949) presented an innovative multi-country, multi-commodity trade model that attached great importance to link commodities and quantity adjustments, not perfect specializations and price adjustments as emphasized by John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall. However, due to some shortcomings, this model was not sufficiently understood and has been forgotten. This study reconstructs Graham’s theory of international values by rectifying the shortcomings. Through this reconstruction, the following is clarified. First, in multi-country, multi-commodity trade models, the existence of link commodities is general and perfect specializations seldom appear; therefore, quantity adjustments are normally performed in the face of demand shifts. Second, notwithstanding unchanging sectoral productivity at a national level, national wage rates can vary greatly according to the patterns of the international division of labor. Third, while the domestic relative wage rate increases with an increase in a home country’s productivity of link commodities, it does not increase with an increase in the productivity of commodities produced only in the home country.

In this paper we investigate Werner Stark’s sociology of knowledge approach in the history of economic thought. This paper explores: 1) the strengths and weaknesses of Stark’s approach to historiography, 2) how this can frame an understanding of mercantilist writings, and 3) the development of a link between a pluralist understanding of economics and the sociology of knowledge approach. The reason for developing this link is to extend the sociology of knowledge approach to encompass a pluralist understanding of economic theorizing and, at the same time, clarify the link between context and economic theory. John Maynard Keynes’s practice of building narratives of intellectual traditions as evidenced in The General Theory is used to develop a position between an understanding of history of economic thought as the evolution of abstract and decontextualized economic theorizing and the view of economic theory as relevant only within the social conditions from which it arose.

More than a century ago, one of the most famous essays ever written in American economics appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” There, Thorstein Veblen claimed that economics was too dominated by a mechanistic view to address the problems of economic life. Since the world and the economy had come to be viewed from an evolutionary perspective after Charles Darwin, it was rather straightforward to argue that the increasingly abstract mathematical character of economics was non-evolutionary. However, Veblen had studied with a first-rate intellect, Charles Sanders Peirce, attending his elementary logic class. If Peirce had written about the future of economics in 1898, it would have been very different than Veblen’s essay. Peirce could have written that economics should become an evolutionary mathematical science and that much of classical and neoclassical economics could be interpreted from an evolutionary perspective.

Though now almost entirely forgotten, Herbert Spencer was among the most widely read thinkers during the late nineteenth century. As part of his system of synthetic philosophy, Herbert Spencer addressed the topics of money and banking. This philosophic system articulates a concept of justice based on the principle of equal freedom. Invoking this principle, Spencer rejected a government-superintended regime of money and banking as unjust. Instead, he morally favored a system of free banking. Spencer also defended this system on economic grounds. His argument was that banks could be self-regulating in their management of the money supply, on the condition that the government limit its activities in the financial sphere to the enforcement of contracts. While Spencer’s case is not beyond questioning on philosophic and political grounds, he offers a distinctive and forceful analysis.

This article is an attempt to offer an assessment of the main coordinates of Simon Nelson Patten’s views on democracy and biological determinism. This will allow us to better delineate the differences—as well as the affinities—between Patten and the core of progressives discussed by Thomas C. Leonard in a series of path-breaking contributions, culminating in his Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. It is our contention that even within the persisting intricacies, ambiguities, and contradictions of Patten’s expository style, it is possible to trace a shift in some aspects of his ideas—a gradual evolution that makes his peculiar brand of progressivism different from that of his most “illiberal” counterparts.

There has long been a presumption that the price-level stabilization frameworks of Irving Fisher and Chicagoans Henry Simons and Lloyd Mints were essentially equivalent. I show that there were subtle, but important, differences in the rationales underlying the policies of Fisher and the Chicagoans. Fisher’s framework involved substantial discretion in the setting of the policy instruments; for the Chicagoans the objective of a policy rule was to tie the hands of the authorities in order to reduce discretion and, thus, monetary policy uncertainty. In contrast to Fisher, the Chicagoans provided assessments of the workings of alternative rules, assessed various criteria—including simplicity and reduction of political pressures—in the specification of rules, and concluded that rules would provide superior performance compared with discretion. Each of these characteristics provided a direct link to the rules-based framework of Milton Friedman. Like Friedman’s framework, Simons’s preferred rule targeted a policy instrument.

In 1899, MIT chemist Ellen H. Richards (1842–1911) instigated a series of annual “Lake Placid Conferences” (1899–1908) that became known as the foundation of the home economics movement. Richards’s first interest was in improving the household’s well-being by using sanitary and nutrition sciences, an objective that was passed on to the movement. However, by the 1920s, home economists rather identified their field of expertise as the “science of consumption,” emphasizing the idea of “rational consumption.” My aim in this article is to give an account of how this shift in focus came about, by telling the story of the home economics movement founded by Richards. I examine how the movement problematized consumption by highlighting its relationship, and perception of itself, regarding economics. I argue that the concept of consumption was central to the structuring of the movement from its beginning and allowed home economists to claim it as their field of expertise because, as they believed, economists were not addressing the issue.

In 1564, Leonhard Fronsperger, a military expert and citizen of the Free Imperial City of Ulm in Upper Germany, publishes the booklet “On the Praise of Self-Interest” (“Von dem Lob deß Eigen Nutzen”). Using the form of a satirical poem, he demonstrates how the individual pursuit of self-interest can lead to the common good. Writing long before Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, Fronsperger presents a thorough analysis of all kinds of self-interested social, political, and economic relations. His praise of self-interest demonstrates how, over the sixteenth century, the interplay of economic success (in particular in major trading cities), a more realistic conception of human behavior, and some aspects of humanism and the Reformation led to a new understanding of the origins of economic dynamics. This becomes the basis for what Max Weber ([1904–05] 2009) would later term “the spirit of capitalism.”

The work of Walter Eucken (1891–1950), founder of German ordoliberalism, is often described as being in direct opposition to that of John Maynard Keynes. Our paper challenges this claim by making two main arguments. First, we show that Eucken supported a proto-Keynesian stimulus program at the height of the Great Depression, the so-called Lautenbach plan of 1931. Second, we analyze his critique of full employment policy, which reveals that Eucken’s approach to solving macroeconomic problems is fundamentally different from, if not necessarily contrary to, that of Keynes.

Friedrich Hayek’s business cycle theory withered throughout the 1930s as he admitted that its underlying model of Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness was incomplete and inadequate. In 1934, Hayek started a two-volume book on capital theory, completing only one volume in 1941. Curiously, Hayek ([1941] 2009) cites John Hicks’s (1939) Value and Capital but not the financial measure of roundaboutness that Hicks suggested as a substitute for Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness. In 1967, in “The Hayek Story,” Hicks criticized the inexplicable lags. Hayek maintained his view that consumption was sticky and responded to Hicks with a mound-of-honey analogy. Nevertheless, Hayek maintained that his business cycle theory was fundamentally correct and continued to hope that others might someday discover a capital structure theory to undergird it. Toward fulfilling Hayek’s hope, we suggest augmenting the canonical stages of production with a sequestered-capital stage where products are invented, productized, and inventoried prior to launch, uncoordinated by observable prices.

The article examines an early and idiosyncratic version of behavioral economics or “empirical socio-economics,” which the German economist and taxation expert Günter Schmölders developed in the postwar decades. Relying on both his published papers and his lecture notes and correspondence, it scrutinizes Schmölders’s intellectual upbringing in the tradition of the Historical School of Economics (Historische Schule der Nationalökonomie) and his relation to the emerging ordoliberalism, demonstrating that the roads that led to dissatisfaction with the emerging neoclassical mainstream and the unrealistic behavioral assumptions of macroeconomic models were manifold. Accordingly, it shows that behavioral economics is compatible with various intellectual and political backgrounds and convictions. Yet, it still forms a distinct entity: comparing Schmölders with contemporary and later behavioral economists, I will show that they shared essential methodological assumptions as well as an understanding of human beings as decision-making organisms.

In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses the cities of necessity and luxury (372d–373a). Discussions of these cities have often focused on citizens desiring more than they need, which creates a demand for luxury. Yet the second part of the equation, which is not usually recognized, is that there must be sufficient supply to meet this demand. The focus of this article is on the importance of supply in the discussion of the first two cities in Book II of the Republic. This article argues that the way Plato models the cities makes it the case that a surplus above levels of necessity will be generated from time to time. That the unwanted surplus cannot be spontaneously disposed of entails that the first two cities are institutionally incomplete. A government is needed in order to coordinate the disposal of the surplus supply the city will produce.

The paper is dedicated to Suzanne de Brunhoff’s monetary thought and shows how her analysis of very concrete monetary and financial problems of her time led her to develop the most innovative contributions to Marxist theory of money since classical Marxism. Concepts such as non-contemporaneity of capitalism with itself, pseudo-social validation, conflict centralization, or State management of money and labor power reflect her profound analysis of the ways capitalism generates very particular relations to space and time. By looking at this spatio-temporal dimension of de Brunhoff’s concepts, this paper aims to reveal the novelty, power, and fruitfulness of her monetary analysis. The first part of the paper seeks to define the meaning of the concept of general equivalent, drawing on her reading of Karl Marx’s Capital, before situating her approach in relation to institutionalist theories of money. The second part considers de Brunhoff’s analysis of the particular time-spaces of capitalism.

We explore disciplinary boundary-making in geographical economics or “the new economic geography” with attention to the approaches taken by, and attempts at communication among, scholars with primary affiliations in economics, geography, and regional science. The Dixit-Stiglitz general equilibrium approach to monopolistic competition and increasing returns was applied to agglomeration and location by Paul Krugman, who had previously pioneered the “new trade theory” building on the Dixit-Stiglitz model, and, independently and slightly earlier, by Masahisa Fujita and his student Heshem Abdel-Rahman, starting from regional science, a tradition with its own departments, doctorates, conferences, and journals distinct from economics and geography. Economic geography, as studied by geographers, had already taken a quantitative and theoretical turn in the 1960s, reviving an earlier tradition of German location theory overshadowed within geography after World War II by areal differentiation. Another strand of economic geography pursued by geographers was influenced by economic theory but by non-neoclassical Marxian and Sraffian economics. Debates between these scholars raised questions whether these analyses were multidisciplinary, drawing on distinct disciplines, or crossed disciplinary boundaries (as when geographical economics in the style of economists is undertaken in geography departments) or transcends disciplinary boundaries, or involved the emergence of a new discipline.