This book presents the history of economic thought as it relates to today’s most pressing problems, and it emphasizes the critical connection that exists between what may seem cold, unrealistic mathematical economic models, and the quality of everyday life of any citizen of the planet earth....

Amid the controversies around the optimisation criteria and the objective functions when applying mathematical methods in economics, we proposed a method of quantifying a multi-criteria optimum, called critical distance method. The demonstration of this method is exemplified by assessing the...

This study is the first of a series of studies, collectively embodying a multiphase mixed methods design. The overall objective of these studies is to explore and address a variety of issues and features of the discipline of economics, particularly as they relate to and represent past present...

The way the expresssion "applied economics" was employed changed deeply from one author to another. In this article we examine the meaning of this concept in Leon Walras' and Wassily Leontief's works regarding mathematical models of general interdependence and general equilibrium. It appears...

From the 1930s, Leontief defended the validity of input-output analysis on the basis of a very specific epistemology: operationalism. Operationalism was not proper to Leontief but it was a common epistemological reference from the 1930s to the 1950s –especially about the status of scientific...

Ragnar Frisch wrote in 1933 that "The complete macrodynamic problem, as I conceive of it, consists in describing as realistically as possible the kind of relations that exist between the various magnitudes in the Tableau Economique ., and from the nature of these relations to explain the...

This is the introductive chapter to the book "Wassily Leontief and Economics", published in February 2019 (ENS editions). Economists produce their statements and forecasts from devices articulating abstract theories with mathematical models and statistical instruments of measurement. What is the...

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a continuing effort to specify and estimate general equilibrium models with rationing (GEMR). However, this applied work has never been studied in a historical perspective. My article contributes to fill this gap. The focus is on the research led by...

Under which conditions did Robert Lucas’s microfoundational program come to dominate the field? My article sheds new light on this question. The focus is on why models incorporating rational expectations and market-clearing seduced macroeconomists. My case study is Robert Barro and Herschel...

The purpose of this note is to demonstrate a sufficient condition for discrete tâtonnement process to lead to chaos in a general equilibrium model with multiple commodities. The result indicates that as the speed of price adjustment increases the discrete tâtonnement process is complex in a...