Between J-B. Say and R. Malthus an important debate took place, witnessed by a number of letters and quotations, mainly concerning the débouchés problem. Quite surprisingly, the respective theories of values are never under discussion in their correspondence, nor quotations on them can be...

John Elliott Cairnes (1823-1875) is best known for his defense of the wages fund doctrine after Mill’s abandonment of it. This essay argues that Cairnes’ ideas represented a substantive advance in classical political economy, in that his ideas were more coherent than those of his...

This paper proposes a reconstruction of one of Torrens little unknown piece of work on the making and the distribution of income among the social classes. The framework assumes a single-good economy with fixed production coefficients. It differs from the contemporary Ricardo theory (that...

In this study, the historical roots of individuality will be examined. According to the view of economic individuality, pursuit of self-interest is the fundamental motivation for all of human beings. When we look into the eighteenth century, the main argument was whether the rise of the...

The article investigates Wicksell's change of mind about the machinery question between 1890 and 1900/1901. Wicksell at first sided with the so-called “compensation theory” that workers are not harmed by the introduction of machinery. In his lecture notes of April 1900, made available here...

The article deals with the relation between assumptions of economic theories and their political implications. Two canons of economic science are being analyzed according to the degree of abstraction. A hypothesis is that the more abstract formal canon is connected with a liberal kind of...

Prospects for the development of an alternative macroeconomic theory are associated with the provisions that the dynamics of the economy is determined by the change of generations of capital and that there is a problem of coordination between different generations of capital. The circulation and...

Harriet Taylor has been long forgotten as an economist and political philosopher, while merely remembered as John Stuart Mill’s friend and belatedly wife. Never was fate more unjust: we only need to recall that Taylor - whose liberal background soon led her to be fascinated by socialist...

The expression subsistence affluence is a catchphrase for certain perceptions of reality in Papua New Guinea, and after 50 years it still actively conditions opinions of the country (even though its population has trebled in the meantime). The paper examines antecedents of the concept in the...

La teoría de la elección racional (TER), es insuficiente como explicación del comportamiento económico, incluso en su versión extendida (Becker). La TER se fundamenta en la maximización del interés-propio como criterio de elección y atribuye su origen al pensamiento de Adam Smith....