David Ricardo indicated in his famous numerical example in the Principles that it would be advantageous to Portugal to import English cloth made by 100 men, although it could have been produced locally with the labor of only 90 Portuguese men. As the production of the cloth required less quantity of labor in Portugal, it has been commonly inferred that this country had a production cost advantage over England in cloth making. This inference will be proven wrong here by showing that the English cloth had a lower cost of production than the Portuguese cloth. This finding refutes the widespread belief that Ricardo had formulated a new law, principle, or rule for international specialization, known as “comparative advantage.” He used the same rule for specialization as Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Thus, the popular contraposition of Smith’s absolute versus Ricardo’s comparative cost advantage has to be dismissed.

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.

This article argues that the self-love that motivates exchange in The Wealth of Nations (WN) can be seen as the desire for deserved approval discussed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). This often overlooked desire appears in TMS as the most representative kind of self-love. Exchange motivated by this desire emerges as the way to find confirmation through others’ appraisal of one’s own self-assessment, and thus to find an agreed-upon measure for respective deserved praise. The target in this economic relationship is that equivalence that signals mutual recognition of deserved esteem. Equivalence here is the aim and not the result of exchange, unlike a tug-of-war, where both parties try to give as little and gain as much as possible regardless of the recognition each deserves.

Robert F. Hébert was the eighteenth president of the History of Economics Society, from 1991 to 1992. He studied at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge from his undergraduate degree (completed in 1965) to his PhD (obtained in 1970). During his academic career he taught economics in the US at Clemson University (South Carolina, 1970 to 1974), Auburn University (Alabama, 1974 to 2000), and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2000 to 2005); and in France at Université de Paris 1 (Sorbonne, 1995) and at the University of Caen (2004). Currently Professor Hébert is Russell Foundation Professor of Economics (Emeritus Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies) at Auburn University, and he resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This interview was done in writing from November 6 to December 18, 2019.

Polly Hill spent her long, productive, and at times controversial career crossing and contesting disciplinary boundaries. She graduated in economics at Cambridge, but her doctorate was in social anthropology—with economist Joan Robinson as dissertation supervisor. Her thirteen years at the University of Ghana were initially in economics, then in African studies, and her readership at Cambridge was in Commonwealth studies. As a woman in several male-dominated academic disciplines without a secure base in any (and with distinctive, unorthodox opinions in each), she never obtained a tenure-track appointment despite ten books and fifty scholarly articles. Her books drew attention to the underrecognized agency of indigenous entrepreneurs while her Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for the Prosecution (1986) critiqued a discipline, disciplinary boundaries, and outside experts, both mainstream and radical.

In his Treatise on Probability John Maynard Keynes criticized the tools of statistical inference derived from probability that were coming into use in the early twentieth century, and outlined an alternative approach to statistical inference based on the logic of induction. This essay argues that Keynes’s ideas were embraced and echoed by several leading US economists during the 1920s and 1930s, including those developing and applying the most sophisticated statistical methods of the day. These economists expressed views regarding statistical inference that were quite similar to those found in Keynes’s Treatise, often citing Keynes as an authority in support. Also, the inferential methods recommended and actually employed by these writers were consistent with Keynes’s ideas about the proper methods of statistical inference.

When scholars investigate the legacy of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (1921) for the development of Keynes’s thinking, the attention usually focuses on the connections among Keynes’s probability theory, his conception of decision-making under uncertainty, and the theory of the functioning of the macroeconomic system that derives from it—through the marginal efficiency of capital, the preference for liquidity, and the self-referential functioning of financial markets. By contrast, this paper aims to investigate the connections between Keynes’s probability theory, on the one hand, and his economic policy recommendations, on the other. It concentrates on the policy recommendations defended by Keynes during the Great Depression but also after the General Theory. Keynes’s economic policy can be understood as a framework for decision-making in situations of uncertainty: fiscal policy aims to induce private agents to change their “rational” probability statements, while monetary policy aims to allow more weight to these statements.

Some well-known economists suggest that a good economist should act like an engineer, a surgeon, a dentist, or even a plumber. These metaphors are useful in helping economists reflect the nature of economics and their role in society. But which is the most sensible one? This paper argues that economists should be playing all these roles and more, because economics is not a single entity, and each entity has separate goals, methods, and boundaries. To take this multiplicity of roles into account, this paper argues that in addition to the traditional boundary that delineates the disciplinary domain of economics against other sciences, an overarching boundary between economic science and applied policy needs to be recognized. It then examines Esther Duflo’s “economist as plumber” metaphor and suggests that a better metaphor for Duflo’s purpose would be “general contractor,” a metaphor that, if accepted, would suggest radical change in training applied policy economists.

As we celebrate the centenary of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (1921), we are still faced with unresolved, fundamental questions about his foray into the philosophy of probability. One of these unresolved questions concerns whether Keynes (1931) later changed his mind in response to intense criticism from Frank Ramsey (1922, 1931) and abandoned the logical theory of probability. This essay draws from Cheryl Misak’s recent biography of Frank Ramsey (2020) to argue that Ramsey had an even wider influence on Keynes’s work than has been recognized, and that this influence was not just on his philosophy of probability but also on his economics. Understood in this fuller context, it seems even more clear that Keynes embraced and built upon Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).