This chapter surveys the classificatory approaches of business cycles and crises theories found in dictionary articles. These are found to belong to a surprisingly small number of types. At first, dictionary writers only cited the theories they wanted to disprove. Then (especially in Germany in...

From the standpoint of policies, the different branches of economics may be aggregated into two categories: dirigiste and laissez fairist. Dirigiste theories in economics have been based primarily on the complexity of commodities: this allows commodities to be ranked according to the...

The evolution of history as an academic discipline began in the 19th century. The role of the German historians in making the discipline cannot be underestimated as Leopold von Ranke is deemed the ‘father of history’. The impeccable role of the father of Sociology, Auguste Comte can also not...

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, which helped generate the data against which...

MIT emerged from "nowhere" in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a...

This book reviews, organizes and categorizes the humor of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash, and presents it to the reader in a clear, readable, accessible manner. These works, replete with many types of humor and wit, have influenced the Jewish people in a major way over the...

Humor is the lingua franca of the Jewish people. Even outside the world of the professional comic, we find ordinary folk answering a question with a question, employing a sarcastic retort, offering self-deprecating witticisms. For Jews, this special brand of humor has become a defining...