In his Nobel lecture, Friedman built on his earlier argument for a 'natural rate of unemployment' by painting a picture of an economics profession which, as a result of foolish mistakes, had accepted the Phillips curve as offering a lasting trade-off between inflation and unemployment and were...

Friedman (1968) - his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association - contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper's crucial argument.  That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift in...

The 'expectations critique', usually attributed to Friedman or Phelps and dated towards the end of the 1960s, in fact originates much earlier.  And rather than being an insight properly attributable to a particular individual, it was, by that time, a commonplace of economic discussion.  This...

Samuelson and Solow published a widely read paper in the May issue of the American Economic Review of 1960. It discussed the causes of inflation, the Phillips curve, and related matters. Discussion of their paper frequently says that it presented the Phillips curve as a stable, exploitable...

There is a widely believed but entirely mythical story to the effect that the discovery of 'the Phillips curve' was, in the 1960s and perhaps later, an inspiration to inflationist policy.  The point that this is a myth is argued in Forder, Macroeconomics and the Phillips curve myth, OUP 2014. ...

The idea of the 'L-shaped aggregate supply curve', supposedly a feature of primitive macroeconomic models, is in fact a reasonable reconstruction of a well developed way of thinking that specifically denied a relation between wage change and aggregate employment.  Neither that approach nor the...

This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targeting with reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF `basic monetary programming framework` for developing countries uses government borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in...

New technology in computing has led some to suggest that the ability to settle transactions electronically will develop to such an extent that money disappears from use. Two versions of this belief exist. One maintains that there will be “e-moneyâ€Â, issued conceivably by...