Robbins's Essay was significant in many ways, but especially in giving economics a definition that came to dominate the professional literature. Our goal in the present paper is to trace the reception of Robbins's definition of economics as, to use a useful abbreviation, the science of scarcity....

The theory of government failure was developed as a reaction against Pigovian welfare economics and the Cambridge approach to economic policy analysis generally, which ostensibly lacked a theory of governmental behavior. We argue that the Cambridge tradition — as reflected in the writings of...