This article--designed to give readers unfamiliar with public choice a historical overview and flavor for the kinds of problems considered--is divided into three main sections, "historical origins," the "modern founders of MPE," and a brief description of some "current issues" studied by public...

One of the more striking features of the debate over the Coase theorem is the wide variety of models and theoretical frameworks used to discuss, evaluate, or otherwise analyze Coase’s result - an artifact of an ambiguity in Coase’s reasoning. Some framed Coase’s result in a bargaining...

Best known as a monetary economist and prominent proponent of monetarism, Karl Brunner was deeply knowledgeable about the philosophy of science and attempted to explicitly integrate logical empiricist thinking, derived in some measure from his engagement with the work of the philosopher Hans...

Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance as for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines - e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

This paper explores the ways in which cybernetics influenced the works of F. A. Hayek from the late 1940s onwar d. It shows that the concept of negative feedback, borrowed from cybernetics, was central to Hayek's attempt of giving an explanation of the principle to the emergence of human...

Richard Cantillon and David Hume both propose the theory of monetary nonneutrality, whereby the money supply changes through the money balances of specific individuals. Such an uneven distribution of monetary change then spreads throughout the economy step by step and changes relative prices....