Adam Smith was the first economist, philosopher or mathematician in history to give a clear and specific definition of what the term “uncertainty” meant and to apply it consistently in his analysis of decision making in the Wealth of Nations. The term uncertainty for Smith, as it was for...

This paper, based on the introductory remarks made at the two-day conference on “The State of the Economy, the State of the World,” is an idiosyncratic stocktaking of the trajectory of economics from Adam Smith to contemporary times, with special attention to the rise of development...

Shackle's attempt to completely redefine Keynes's definition of uncertainty in chapter 12 of the General Theory, which was that uncertainty is an inverse function of the weight of the evidence as discussed in chapters 6 and 26 of the A Treatise on Probability, as unknowledge (no knowledge of the...

Adam Smith completely rejected Utilitarianism in any form in his lifetime in his two major books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). This paper will examine the basis for Smith’s rejection of Utilitarianism in the Wealth of Nations (1776) only. The Virtue...

The current dominant belief among economists that Smith made no original contributions to economic theory outside of presenting an original system of thought that was composed of the original analysis of other thinkers is incorrect.Smith made four unique contributions which have been overlooked....

This paper outlines the development of Hayek's account of the working of decentralised economies, focusing in particular on his move away from using the notion of economic equilibrium towards an emphasis on the notion of 'order'

In den Wirtschaftswissenschaften lassen sich zwei Theorietypen unterscheiden: Die "idealistische Ökonomie" geht von einem Idealzustand aus und untersucht die Bedingungen, unter denen dieser erreicht werden kann wie die Eigenschaften des "homo oeconomicus". Die "realistische Ökonomie" geht vom...