Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis

South African Journal of EconomicsVolume 57, Issue 2 p. 120-124 Economic Sanctions and Interest Group Analysis: Some Reservations P. A. BLACK, P. A. BLACK Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch and Department of Economics and Economic History, Rhodes University, East London, respectively.Search for more papers by this authorJ. H. COOPER, J. H. COOPER Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch and Department of Economics and Economic History, Rhodes University, East London, respectively.Search for more papers by this author P. A. BLACK, P. A. BLACK Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch and Department of Economics and Economic History, Rhodes University, East London, respectively.Search for more papers by this authorJ. H. COOPER, J. H. COOPER Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch and Department of Economics and Economic History, Rhodes University, East London, respectively.Search for more papers by this author First published: June 1989 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1813-6982.1989.tb00188.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume57, Issue2June 1989Pages 120-124 RelatedInformation

The study of the history of economics in Australia has just gone through an existential struggle of the greatest significance. On the surface it was only the most trivial of matters, a proposed clerical change in the classification of the History of Economic Thought by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). But, insignificant as it might at first appear, it was a proposal that had the potential to all but eliminate the history of economics as a legitimate academic study within Australia. The core issue was whether History of Economic Thought and Economic History were to be included as sub-disciplines of economics within the ABS classification system. The ABS proposal was that both groups were to be placed in an entirely separate category under the heading, `History, Archaeology, Religion and Philosophy?. Neither would any longer be classified in any way as belonging to the study of economics. It was this proposal that commenced a short but ultimately successful campaign to have both areas retain their position within the economics classification. But, short as it was, and as narrow as the issues might seemingly be, into this campaign was brought a national and international array of economists which included presidents of international societies in the history of economic thought, economists from throughout the upper levels of the public service in Australia, historians of economics from across the world and which even included the strong views of the 2006 Nobel prize winner in economic theory ...

An unfailing element in the Italian tradition of economics is a deep concern with its past. However, motivations have been different through time. Neoclassical economists, such as Pantaleoni and Einaudi, approached the past in order to demonstrate the eternity of the «economic dogma». This absolutist stance probably explains the undisputable retardation of interest towards the history of economic thought during the heyday of Keynesianism in Italy, that in fact brought to the eclipse of this «dogma». On his part, after 1960, Sraffa had the merit of prompting a renewed interest in classical and Marxian economics, but this was not sufficient to relaunching historical work in Italy. Nowadays, when we assist to a new wave of research in the history of economics, a stronger collaboration between historians and economists is not only desirable but feasible, if based on methodological pluralism, mutual respect and a fruitful interchange of ideas and knowledge. Some cases in which this collaboration has already given excellent results are conclusively indicated.

The place for the teaching of and research dealing with the history of economics continues to draw attention, at least from within our speciality. Recent examples are the History of Political Economy mini-symposium (1992) that was anchored to Margaret Schabas's paper and Donald Walker's affirming essay in theJournal of the History of Economic Thought(1999). The former asked whether the history of economics, given the neglect shown by mainstream economics, should be incorporated into history of science programs. The latter argued that this neglect is unfortunate because there is a place for the history of economics in the training of economists. (The neglect is documented by Aslanbegui and Naples (1997).) An important feature of Walker's essay is that the argument was based on structural aspects of the discipline. His point of departure was Donald Gordon's (1965) claim that there is little in the history of economic analysis that facilitates the understanding of current economics and the research problems with which it is concerned. Certainly the education of natural scientists, as Gordon noted, is consistent with this claim. George Stigler (1969) made a similar claim, and both more or less took the conclusion to be self-evident. Walker's response was that, at least among a variety of important sub-disciplines, there is not professional consensus and, therefore, there may not be a sharp distinction between current and past theory. This suggests that some form of historical analysis may be useful. Walker's paper moved the discussion away from arguments that begin with the presumption that every educated economist should be versed in the origins of economics. Instead, he focused on questions relating to history as a tool for understanding and for doing today's economics. In this respect, Walker returned to an issue addressed by Filippo Cesarano (1983)—they both focused on historical studies as a source of illumination for current economic analysis.

Francois Quesnay’s achievement is one of the most remarkable in the history of economics. He published his first article on an economic problem in 1756 when he was 62 years old, and in the following twelve years he produced a series of influential articles and successive versions of his famous Tableau Economique. He also became the centre of the first school of economists, the Physiocrats or Economistes of pre-revolutionary France. The Tableau has two multipliers, one of them almost Keynesian, and Leontief has said that he was following Quesnay when he constructed his input-output table of the United States economy in 1941.1 Marx, who according to Schumpeter derived his fundamental conception of the economic process as a whole from Quesnay,2 called it ‘an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible’,3 and in 1935 Schumpeter himself described Quesnay as one of the four greatest economists of all time.4

Introduction Jose Luis Cardoso, Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Maria Eugenia Romero Sotelo Part I: Insights from the History of Economic Thought 1. Economic Development: Past and present Cosimo Perrotta 2. Jeremy Bentham's Spanish American Utopia Annie L. Cot 3. Reconsidering Protectionism in Friedrich List's Economic Theory Juan Fernando Palacio 4. Some Lessons for Monetary Policy Based on Interest Rates Rules from Myrdal's Monetary Equilibrium: Why should we read Myrdal as a complement of Wicksell? Adrian De Leon-Arias 5. Recollecting Kalecki's Studies of the US Economy Julio Lopez G Part II: Latin American Development Theory and Experience Re-Visited 6. Raul Prebisch and the Keynesian Theory in Latin America Claudia Sunna 7. CEPAL on Investment Criteria and the Planning of Import-Substituting Industrialization Mauro Boianovsky 8. High Development Theory: CEPAL and beyond Davide Gualerzi and Alan Cibils 9. The Concept of Marginality in Latin American Thought: Perspectives and approaches for understanding history Veronica Villarespe and Hilda Caballero 10. The Dependency Theory and Development: A historical review Erasmo Saenz Carrete 11. The New-Style of Developmentalism in Latin America: Kubitschek and Frondizi Pedro Cezar Dutra Fonseca and Maria Heloisa Lenz 12. Brief Review of Mexico's Foreign Debt 1824-2010 Juan Carlos Tellez Mosqueda 13. The Crises in Peripheral Countries 1994-2002 and the Balance of Payments Theory: A Historical Approach Noemi Brenta

Given our plan to discuss epistemology in all its various guises in the modern history of orthodox economics, we begin this book by squarely confronting the treatment of Truth in economic theory. We suggest that broader cultural attitudes toward Truth and its accessibility are situated in a context larger than economics, using detective stories as our example. From there, we proceed to discuss some attempts to shoehorn the “history of rationality” into the history of economics.

History of Economic Thought - History of Economic Analysis, by Joseph A. Schumpeter. Edited from manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Pp. xxv, 1260. $17.50. - Volume 15 Issue 3

Mary Theresa Rankin (lived 1882–1962, MA Edinburgh 1910, DPhil Oxford 1919) taught economics at the University of Edinburgh from 1921 to 1953, continuing the monetary tradition of her teacher Joseph Shield Nicholson. Five years older than the economic historian Isabel Frances Grant, Rankin was a pathbreaker for women in economics in Scotland. Her first two books examined wage-setting in Australia and New Zealand, but she wrote primarily on monetary economics, in papers collected as Monetary Opinions and Policy, 1924–34 (1935) and in later articles such as “British and American Monetary Plans” ( The Scotsman, 1943). She was often invited to pronounce of monetary controversy in The Scotsman, for example responding to John Maynard Keynes’s 1933 Times articles “The Means to Prosperity.” Rankin’s vigorous, eloquent, and, in Scotland, influential upholding of the Nicholson tradition in monetary economics against Keynesian innovations has been overlooked in the history of interwar British monetary economics, which has focused on Cambridge, Oxford and LSE, a literature in which Rankin has been doubly marginalized as a woman in Scotland, and in the history of economics in Scotland, which has not focused on the entry of women. This chapter examines Rankin’s monetary economics and her role in interwar and wartime monetary debates. JEL Classifications: B31 History of Economic Thought: Individuals; B31 History of Economic Thought since 1925: Macroeconomics; E Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate the existence of a positive discourse of communitarian anarchist economic thought. A secondary aim is to show that there is intellectual space within the genre of ‘histories of economic thought’ that permits a claim for communitarian anarchism to stand alongside all other discourses of economic thought that compete with the hegemonic neo-classical paradigm. Throughout the twentieth century, histories of economic thought have ignored the positive dimensions of all socialist or anarchist discourses. Only the critiques of capitalism or proposals for the civilising of capitalism have been considered to be worthy of entry into the ‘voyager’s log’ of the course to the ‘Promised Land’. Most histories of economic thought selectively engage ‘socialism’ only through Marxism. These observations of the highly selective nature of histories of economic thought are not new (see, eg, Heilbroner 1979; Eff 1989; McCloskey 1983; Strassman 1993; Schabas 1992). It is still worth asking the question Schumpeter (1972, p.34) asked half a century ago, ‘Is the History of Economics a History of Ideologies?’

It is generally considered that the theoretical development in supply-demand equilibrium theory by J.S. Mill from supply and demand ratio theory by Adam Smith and David Ricardo is the most important event in the history of economics. Marshall (On Mr. Mill’s theory of value. Fortnightly Review, April, reprinted in Pigou AC (ed) Memorials of Alfred Marshall, London, 1925, 1876) and Schwarz (The new political economy of J.S. Mill. Duke University Press, Durham, 1972) identify Mill’s pricing model about absolutely limited commodities in quantity as a partial equilibrium theory. However, his pricing model is not governed by the laws of simultaneous determination between a quantity and a price at all. Followers have been misunderstanding the term “equation” that Mill used in the pricing. Mill’s system is not supply-demand equilibrium theory, but rather sequential process model with time, like Robinson (Econ J 63(251):579–593, 1953) and Leijonhufvud (On keynesian economics and the economics of keynes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1968).

I suggest that converting economic history from a topic to a discipline requires three steps: economic theory and quantitative methodology must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good economic history; economic history and historical statistics must be relevant and necessary for writing and teaching good economic theory; and economic history must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good history. Over the past 50 years the first task has been accomplished and the second nearly so. The third task remains, but incorporating the life-cycle perspective into economic history would hasten its successsful completion.

In this review essay of Steven G. Medema and Anthony M. C. Waterman's collection of some of Paul Samuelson's writings in the history of economics, the author argues that Samuelson's claim to have written “Whig history” is spurious. Moreover, the author argues that Samuelson's own writings on modern economics are, whether explicit or not, profoundly autobiographical. Samuelson, in constructing a literature ostensibly about contemporary economics, was simultaneously constructing a literature in which he and contemporary economics could be jointly considered and appraised.

This article focuses on the scholarly contributions of Franco Modigliani, 1985 Nobel laureate in economics. Particular attention is given to his formulation of the determinants of equilibrium in Keynesian macroeconomics, the life-cycle hypothesis of saving, his contributions to the theory of expectations, and the Modigliani–Miller theorems of corporate finance. The objective is to demonstrate Modigliani’s importance in the history of economics.

Dennis R. Appleyard of Davidson College reviews “Famous Figures and Diagrams in Economics” edited by Mark Blaug and Peter Lloyd. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Fifty-eight papers examine figures and diagrams commonly used in economic theory, their roles in economic analysis, and their histories. The figures and diagrams discussed fall under the categories of basic tools of demand and supply curve analysis; welfare economics; special markets and topics; basic tools of general equilibrium analysis; open economies; macroeconomic analysis and stabilization; and growth, income distribution, and other topics. Blaug is Professor Emeritus at the University of London and the University of Buckingham. Lloyd is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne. Index. Subject Descriptor(s): History of Economic Thought through 1925: General B10 History of Economic Thought since 1925: General B20 Microeconomics: General D00 Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics: General E00”