Joseph Charlier is best known as the author of the first proposal for a nationwide basic income. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this reformer by highlighting the originality and coherence of his overall project, situated within the intellectual and political context of the nineteenth century. A committed socialist, Charlier advocated not only the introduction of a universal dividend but also the nationalization of land ownership and the establishment of an extensive system of public education, conceived as means of guaranteeing everyone an equal right to the development of their capacities and of putting an end to the domination of capital over labor. At the same time, he displayed a strong attachment to several fundamental principles of economic liberalism. The article shows that this articulation, far from reflecting doctrinal inconsistency, outlines a “third way” avant la lettre, aimed at reconciling social justice, individual freedom, and economic efficiency. It concludes with an analysis of the historical failure of this proposal and of the contemporary relevance of some of its theoretical contributions.
This article examines how the conceptualisation of consumption in terms of marginal utility took shape in the political economy of William Stanley Jevons and how this conceptualisation differed from John Stuart Mill’s perspective. For Mill, consumption was a practice, an action desired for its own sake that provided enjoyment. Consequently, he excluded consumption from the science of political economy, situating it instead within the art of domestic economy. This article argues that Jevons’s conceptualisation of consumption drew inspiration from Richard Jennings’ Natural Elements of Political Economy (1855), which integrated the principles of physiological psychology into political economy. Jennings’ psychological and methodological approach altered Mill’s conception of the desire to consume, enabling him to reintegrate consumption into the scientific framework of political economy. In the process, the meaning of consumption changed: it was no longer the wasteful destruction of wealth that classical economists saw in it, but rather the use of wealth as one of the springs of action. As a result, consumption was no longer an end in itself or the end of political economy; instead, it became a means to maximise satisfaction.
This article examines the monetary and financial reforms implemented by Minister of the Economy Pierre Bérégovoy within Laurent Fabius’s government between 1984 and 1986. It demonstrates how, in the context following the so-called “austerity turn”, this economic policy contributed to reshaping the structures of the French economy by redirecting the national system of financing towards the financial markets, thereby paving the way for the financialization of the 1990s. The article highlights how these reforms represent the culmination of years of internal criticism within the state of the administratively regulated approach to monetary and financial governance. Drawing upon archival material from senior civil servants and ministerial advisers, as well as grey literature, it explores the complex relationship between academic knowledge and economic policymaking. It also argues that the socialist disinflation policy was, in part, inspired by monetarist principles.
This article revisits a pivotal moment in Benoit Mandelbrot's intellectual trajectory: the unexpected connection he discovered between the distribution of personal income and the fluctuations of speculative prices. Drawing on Mandelbrot's own narrative in The Fractalist and his 1962 note to the Comptes Rendus de l'Acad & eacute;mie des Sciences, we highlight how a surprising blackboard diagram at Harvard led him to bridge two seemingly unrelated domains of economics. This encounter not only marked one of the "most memorable" days of his life but also laid the ground for his emphasis on the deep affinities between income distributions and speculative price theory.
Zipf’s law, although robust in experimental terms, remains controversial. Three models stand out, namely those of Benoît Mandelbrot, Herbert A. Simon, and George A. Miller. Inspired by Zipf’s work, Mandelbrot and Simon were at the center of a scientific controversy, disputing the mechanism behind Zipf’s law. Miller, meanwhile, developed a graphometric model dealing with the writing of words. We point out that these mathematical models are not universally generalizable. Therefore, in order to explain them, we provide an example, underlining the experimental nature of this law. This article concludes by discussing the concepts of law, model, and universality, which are at the essence of the definition of Zipf’s law.
In this article, I explore the efforts to mathematize finance—particularly stock markets—and analyze what is gained and lost through this process, focusing on Mandelbrot’s mathematical theory. I specifically investigate two main approaches to building a mathematical framework for financial systems: the top-down and bottom-up approaches, assessing the epistemic and methodological benefits and drawbacks of each. I argue that Mandelbrot’s theory aligns with the bottom-up approach, and I will compare it to another attempt to mathematize stock markets: Sornette’s econophysical approach, which follows a top-down methodology. These two cases offer valuable insights into the creation of scientific theories and the process of mathematizing complex phenomena like stock markets.
This article revisits a pivotal moment in Benoît Mandelbrot’s intellectual trajectory: the unexpected connection he discovered between the distribution of personal income and the fluctuations of speculative prices. Drawing on Mandelbrot’s own narrative in The Fractalist and his 1962 note to the Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, we highlight how a surprising blackboard diagram at Harvard led him to bridge two seemingly unrelated domains of economics. This encounter not only marked one of the “most memorable” days of his life but also laid the ground for his emphasis on the deep affinities between income distributions and speculative price theory.
Benoît Mandelbrot’s argument in 1963 and later for the prevalence of fat-tailed distributions (“wild randomness”) was presented as a challenge to Louis Bachelier’s 1900 model of asset price movements as Brownian motion in efficient markets. There was, however, another side to Bachelier’s contribution, discovered and reported by Mandelbrot in 1967 but still not generally known. Bachelier (1914) was the first to show the crucial empirical weaknesses of his own 1900 approach: successive asset price movements are not statistically independent, and the variance of the movements is too large to be represented by any reasonable combination of Gaussian distributions.
