This paper forms part of a research project investigating conceptions of the relationship between micro-level self-seeking agent behaviour and the desirability or otherwise of the resulting macro-level social outcomes in the history of economics. I identify two kinds of conservative rhetorical...

Theoretical study identifying one modality with conditions necesary for the financial stabilization of an inherently unstable system; and 5040 other unstable dynamic modes. It draws on knowledge made available by the academic field of Control Engineering.

This paper revisits Keynes’s liquidity preference theory as it evolved from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and after, with a view of assessing the theory’s ongoing relevance and applicability to issues of both monetary theory and policy. Contrary to the neoclassical “special...

Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary alternative to mainstream environmental economics. Attempts have been made to outline a methodology for ecological economics and it is probably fair to say that, at this point, ecological economics takes a “pluralistic” approach. There are,...

This paper examines the economic rationale of the ideas of Gladstone & Chadwick on railway regulation and the legacy of their ideas. In 1844 Gladstone proposed and implemented what we would now call price and quantity regulation whereas in 1859 Chadwick proposed competition "for the field", i.e....

Adam Smith (1776) is generally ignored as an international trade theorist in textbooks and surveys because of the common belief that he only confirmed the rule of absolute advantages to explain structure of foreign trade. On the other hand, many textbooks and surveys on growth theories simply...

This paper investigates the (re-) establishment of central banking in West Germany after 1945 and the history of the Bundesbank Act of 1957. The main focus is on the early emphasis on the ‘independence’ of the central bank, which, together with a ‘stability-orientation’ in monetary...

This paper reconstructs the history of experimental research on consumer demand behavior between 1930 and 1970. The backgrounds of the experiments and their impact on the development of consumption theory are also investigated. Among other things, the paper shows that in fact many prominent...

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he...

This paper argues that the Stock-Flow Consistent Approach to macroeconomic modeling can be seen as a natural outcome of the path taken by Keynesian macroeconomic thought in the 1960s and 1970s, a theoretical frontier that remained largely unexplored with the end of Keynesian academic hegemony....