[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank...

As the conception of and debates on regional powers have been led by political science, this pa-per aims to contribute to the discussion from an economics perspective. Based on the discussion of different concepts of economic power - such as those of Schumpeter, Perroux, Predöhl, or...

In Hume's epistemology, induction leads to discovery in matters of fact. However, because of the poor data Hume analyzes the balance of trade with a thought experiment, doing what Mill makes explicit afterwards: reason from assumptions, to reach conclusions which are true in the abstract. Hume's...

This paper describes the origins of the logistic function, its adoption in bio-assay, and its wider acceptance in statistics. Its roots spread far back to the early 19th century; the survival of the term logistic and the wide application of the device have been determined decisively by the...

In this article I take up the relationship between economics and law in the hundred-year period preceding the establishing of economics as a separate discipline. Rather than providing a review of historical milestones, I concentrate on some observations that illustrate the relationship between...

The increasing wage inequality in many countries is usually seen as brought about by economic forces that drive for economic efficiency within a changing technological and social environment. Ethical evaluations of these developments diverge, yet the view that free labor markets drive to...

The rhetoric of positivism had a profound effect on the worldview and practice of economists in the middle of the last century. Though this influence has greatly diminished, it still may be found in the attitude of many economists towards the history of their discipline. This paper traces the...

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with Genera l Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Ha yek gave interviews that were published in the...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...