What is perhaps most curious about 'Say's law' is the continuing disagreement on its substance and to whom it should be credited. John Maynard Keynes summarized the law as 'supply creates its own demand' but it is now generally agreed that Keynes did not get it quite right. The author has been...

Early critics of John Stuart Mill attacked him for creating a monomaniacal economic man concerned only with the accumulation of money. In fact, Mill's construct possessed a considerably richer psychology including desires for leisure, luxury, and sexual relations. This psychology played a...

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...

This article gives a history of American institutionalism, and a brief comparison with the more recent "new" institutional economics. Institutionalism was a significant element in American economics between the Wars, but declined rapidly thereafter. The article outlines the movement's initial...

Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whose work reflects a broad and thoroughly...

Alan Krueger and Timothy Taylor interviewed Zvi Griliches, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, at his home near the Harvard campus on June 21, 1999. The interview touches on his harrowing journey from Lithuania to Chicago; years at the University of Chicago; the move to...

This paper surveys the contributions of Nobel laureates James Mirrlees and William Vickrey to the study of asymmetric information in economics, particularly as they relate to problems in public economics. It discusses and interprets Mirrlees's work on optimal income taxation and relates it to...

Joseph A. Schumpeter's celebrated theory of creative destruction was anticipated by David Wells's Recent Economic Changes (1989). In some respects, Wells's treatment is superior to that of Schumpeter. Unlike Schumpeter, who believed that monopolistic competition could maximize economic growth,...

Victor Fuchs is a towering figure. His contributions to economics have spanned nearly 35 years. As his career has progressed, he has increasingly come to write on subjects of broad interest in a style that is accessible to noneconomists, thereby magnifying his influence. His gift is an ability...

For the past thirty-five years, Herbert Scarf has made fundamental contributions in studies of inventories, the core, computation of equilibria, and integer programming. His work has simultaneously sought the most general and abstract formulations while simplifying the theory and bringing it...