Since the Middle Ages, each epoch has participated in the debate over the conditions in which lending should be prohibited as usury. While disagreements over the definition of usury remain, the debate came to its modern climax on the eve of the industrial revolution, in a well-known interchange...

The term "consumer sovereignty" is usually traced to William Harold Hutt and his 1936 book Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion. Hutt paid only passing attention to the maximization of consumer welfare or the achievement of market efficiency. He was stalking different...

Poor law reform in the early 1830s provides a key example of the deep conflicts between classical liberal principles of self-reliance and the realities of dependency. Eminent economists, such as Nassau Senior and Thomas Malthus, argued that the dependency of women and children calls forth and...

Vilfredo Pareto, using data for England, a number of Italian cities, several German states, Paris, and Peru, plotted cumulative distributions of income for these countries on double logarithmic paper. He claimed that in each case the result was a straight line with about the same slope. Thus, he...

For the U.S. economy, the last quarter of the 19th century brought the closing of the Western frontier, agricultural hardship in the South, the rise of large corporations and trusts, and the emergence of a serious labor movement. The fledgling American economics profession struggled to document...

In the debates over "economic calculation" launched by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and extending well into the 1940s, the central issue concerned the ability of a socialist economy to achieve allocative efficiency. Von Mises emphasized that a collectivist state would have great difficulty in...

The spreading use of indexes in the nineteenth century raised basic questions concerning the nature of absolute value in a neoclassical world of relative exchange values. Where Walsh held that the 'right' index for the general exchange value of money would identify true values, Jevons, Marshall,...