Present-day macroeconomics has sometimes been dubbed ‘the new neoclassical synthesis’, suggesting that it constitutes a reincarnation of the neoclassical synthesis of the 1950s. This paper assesses this understanding. To this end, we examine the contents of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’...

Present-day macroeconomics has sometimes been dubbed ‘the new neoclassical synthesis’, suggesting that it constitutes a reincarnation of the neoclassical synthesis of the 1950s. This paper assesses this understanding. To this end, we examine the contents of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’...

Some historians argue that the history of economic thought (HET) is useful and important to economists and that historians should remain in economics departments. Others believe that historians’ initiatives toward economists are doomed in advance to failure and that they should instead ally...

Frank P. Ramsey (b. 1903 – d. 1930) was a Cambridge mathematician who interacted closely to leading economists of his time such as Arthur Cecil Pigou, John Maynard Keynes and Roy Harrod. In the 1920s he was considered by many as a brilliant student who was clearly integrated to the elite group...

Paul Anthony Samuelson proposed and practiced a program for the Whig history of economics. One such example is his account of Frank Ramsey’s contribution to optimal taxation in 1927. For him, and mainly for the public finance economists who rediscovered later Ramsey’s contribution, Ramsey...

Macroeconomists have emphasized the force of facts in forging a consensus understanding of business cycle fluctuations. According to this view, rival economists could no longer hold disparate views on the topic because “facts have a way of not going away” (Blanchard 2009). But how can...

Macroeconomics, or the science of fluctuations in aggregate activity, has always been portrayed as a field composed of competing schools of thought and in a somewhat recurrent state of disarray. Nowadays, macroeconomists are proud to announce that a new synthesis characterizes their field: no...