The classic history of economic thought through the ages—now fully updated and expanded Hesiod defined the basic economic problem as one of scarce resources, a view still held by economists today. Diocletian tried to save the Roman Empire with wage and price fixes—a strategy that has not gone entirely out of style. Roger Backhouse takes readers from the ancient world to the frontiers of game theory, mechanism design, and engagements with climate science, presenting an essential history of a discipline that economist Alfred Marshall called "the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life." Backhouse introduces the many fascinating figures who have thought about money and markets down through the centuries—from philosophers and theologians to politicians and poets—and shows how today's economic ideas have their origins in antiquity. This updated edition of The Ordinary Business of Life includes a new chapter on contemporary economics and the rest of the book has been thoroughly revised.

Over the past decade, Lawrence Summers has argued that stagnation cannot be rectified by monetary policy because it is the result of a negative natural rate of interest. This analysis brings together two separate streams of thought: traditions in which stagnation has been connected to excessive saving linked to income distribution, or to diminishing investment demand; and a tradition centred on the natural rate of interest and its relationship to the market rate. However, they remained largely separated until Summers brought them together. Modern discussions of the natural rate stem from Knut Wicksell's Interest and Prices (1898). However, although he came close to arguing that the natural rate might be negative during cyclical depressions, it was mainly under-consumptionists who argued for the possibility of stagnation. These two strands of thinking came closer in the interwar period but they remained separate. The main advocate of secular stagnation, Alvin Hansen, drew on the American Institutionalist tradition, not Wicksell. Postwar Keynesians did not pursue the idea of a negative natural rate even though Samuelson had provided a theoretical explanation. It was not until Summers that a negative natural rate, income distribution and the possibility of secular stagnation were brought together.

was one of the most influential economists in the second half of the twentieth century.In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of economic growth.Among economists he was a popular choice.Not only had the Solow growth model become one of the main conceptual tools used in the discipline but Solow was also highly regarded for his work in other areas of economics.He exemplifies what is often considered the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) way of doing economics: using simple mathematical models tailored to the problem in hand, taking account of all available evidence.Solow also played an important role as a teacher and hence in the emergence of MIT as one of the most influential economics departments in the world.He was a very popular supervisor, always attending to the needs of students.His conscientiousness as a teacher is illustrated by his habit of discarding his lecture notes each time he delivered a course, so that the process of rewriting them every year would ensure that his teaching did not become stale.(There was one year when he kept his notes because he wanted to use them as the basis for a textbook, which was never written.)The list of his students he supervised reads like a 'Who's who' of modern economics, including, among many others, Joseph Stiglitz (growth and distribution), George Akerlof (wages and capital), William Nordhaus (technological change), Peter Diamond (optimal growth) and Martin Weitzman (indicative planning).The list is also remarkable because, from 1954 to 1997, he supervised theses on a great variety of subjects. 1If we included students who took his courses but

Abstract This article argues that it was no coincidence that one of the places in which the modern theory of finance was developed was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not only had it attracted Paul Samuelson, who had a long-standing interest in the problem, but its academic culture as a science-focused engineering school that fostered a competitive atmosphere and close relations between its economics department and business school was conducive to the development of such theories.

teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

The usages of the terms ‘natural rate of unemployment’ and 'NAIRU' (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) in English-language publications are considered and compared. It is argued that contrary to what has sometimes been suggested, there is no consistent difference in the economic theory underlying the two ideas. However, there is, to a significant extent, and particularly in the 1980s, a difference in the way the two terms were used: choice of language typically depended on the questions being addressed. That difference, in turn, arose substantially from the different macroeconomic experiences of the US and Europe. In the 1980s, faced with persistently high unemployment, European economists developed structural econometric models seeking to understand the determination of 'the NAIRU'. In later years, as economic circumstances changed, usage became more homogeneous and choices about it seem to have been much more a matter of personal taste or habit.

The collapse of 2008-9 should have shifted the attention of macroeconomics from the problem of inflation in otherwise stable economies to the problem of economic, and especially financial, instability.That it has barely done so is my main excuse for writing this book.(p.347)The topic of the final chapter is therefore 'Reinventing Political Economy'.His argument is that macroeconomics (the branch of economics that deals with the performance of the economy as a whole, analysing the behaviour of magnitudes such as national income or GDP, inflation and unemployment) has taken a wrong turning; the dominant macroeconomic theories are based on assumptions, such as that individuals are perfectly (or mainly) rational, that bear little resemblance to reality.Useful economics, Skidelsky argues, should 'make no strong a priori claims about individual behaviour', and should 'refrain from the claim that aggregate outcomes can, in general, be understood as the summed behaviour of maximising individuals: a claim that can lead to the absurd conclusion that unemployment is voluntary' (p.390).Economics is often 'a drying reservoir of abstractions ' and, '[t]o replenish itself, it needs to renew its sources.A return to Keynes is one route; a reopening of the discipline to sociology, history, politics and ethics is another, even if at some cost to its prized professionalism' (ibid.).

The Introduction explains the concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism, relating it to the way economistss have typically approached the problem of welfare. Drawing on the chapters in the volume, it explores ways in which economists have departed from welfarism when tackling practical problems and discussing public policy.

This innovative history of welfare economics challenges the view that welfare economics can be discussed without taking ethical values into account. Whatever their theoretical commitments, when economists have considered practical problems relating to public policy, they have adopted a wider range of ethical values, whether equality, justice, freedom, or democracy. Even canonical authors in the history of welfare economics are shown to have adopted ethical positions different from those with which they are commonly associated. Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values explores the reasons and implications of this, drawing on concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism developed in modern welfare economics. The authors exemplify how economic theory, public affairs and political philosophy interact, challenging the status quo in order to push economists and historians to reconsider the nature and meaning of welfare economics.

The “instrumental university” is the term chosen by Ethan Schrum to denote institutions dominated not by disinterested scholarship and the pursuit of truth but by activities that directly serve the interests of society. It produces research that has demonstrable influence, often commissioned by the state or outside bodies. This new understanding of the university’s mission and its role in society has sometimes been associated with the rise of neoliberalism, but as Schrum demonstrates in The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II, it has much deeper roots in early twentieth-century progressivism and became firmly established in the two decades after the Second World War. The transformation of the elite university into the instrumental university had institutional as well as intellectual implications, with traditional departmental structures being challenged by organized research units. The rise of the instrumental university was propelled by a vision of...

This volume, which is part of a series edited by Robert Cord, has the stated aim of examining the transformation of economics that has taken place since the Second World War by recruiting a mixture...