The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-which stood out in the midst of a review of...

Half a century ago, <em>Economica</em> published what its webpage claims is "the most heavily cited macroeconomics title of the 20th century"—the paper by A. W. H. "Bill" Phillips (1958) that introduced the Phillips curve. Based on admittedly circumstantial evidence, I will argue that Bill Phillips was...

In 1995, Robert E. Lucas was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science. This review places Lucas's work in a historical context and evaluates the effect of this work on the economics profession. Lucas's central contribution is that he developed and applied economic theory to answer...

Where average fixed costs are large compared to marginal costs, competition will drive industry into bankruptcy. During the last century, the chaos that competition created within the railroad industry caused many prominent U.S. economists to reject the market in favor of trusts, cartels, and...

In writings about the history of the use of mathematical expression in economics, there seems to be a conviction that the movement towards its current flowering was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. While, such notions are widely held among practicing economists, I want to argue that...

The story of 20th century macroeconomics begins with Irving Fisher. In his books Appreciation and Interest (1896), The Rate of Interest (1907), and The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher fueled the intellectual fire that became known as monetarism. But what has happened to monetarism at...

The concept of "labor hoarding," at least in its modern form, was first fully articulated in the early 1960s by Arthur Okun (1963). By the end of the 20th century, the concept of "labor hoarding" had become an accepted part of economists' explanations of the workings of labor markets and of the...

In 1969, Harry Johnson charged that Milton Friedman 'invented' a Chicago oral quantity theory tradition, the idea being that in order to launch a monetarist counter-revolution, Friedman needed to establish a linkage with pre-Keynesian orthodoxy. This paper shows that there was a distinct...

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,...

Roy Radner has been elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. To illustrate the Radner style, I have chosen the example of his turnpike theorem, even though this is not quite illustrative of his central concerns. I shall follow this with a brief survey of his...