James Ahiakpor's critique of our 2002 work on the relationship between a certain 1932 Harvard Memorandum on anti-depression policies and the 1932 Harris Foundation Manifesto dealing with the same issues misses the significance of these documents, and of the relationships between them, both for...

The informal institutional structure embraces the social norms and moral values of a particular society and together with the formal institutional frame they compose the social environment. Social norms and values, congealed into customary rules of behaviour, provide a stable and enduring...

This paper examines James Steuart's explanation of the emergence of the exchange economy. An initial hypothesis holds the decisive influence of a plan designed and implemented by merchants. Our proposal evokes the importance, acknowledged by Steuart, of the construction of institutions,...

In many works Deirdre McCloskey criticizes professional economics for ignoring virtues. Even though I disagree with details of her analysis I concur with her general conclusions. In the paper I sketch my own perspective on how economists could profit from the virtue discourse as developed by...

In their recent book Where Economics Went Wrong, David Colander and Craig Freedman (2018) argue that economics went wrong when it abandoned the Classical liberal firewall that demanded separation of scientific theory from the art of policy making. Colander has long advanced the idea that applied...

It is ‘…quite puzzling,indeed'(Skidelsky,1992p.71) how a paper as extremely poor and deficient as R. B. Braithwaite's editorial foreword could have been selected to appear at the beginning of the 1973 Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 8, version of the A Treatise on...

This paper offers a reinterpretation of quot;Adam Smith's problemquot; and reconsiders the relation between ethics and economics. It makes a critical revision of the attempts that seek to solve this problem, proposes an alternative framework constructed on the Smithian concepts of sympathy and...

Mikhail Tugan‑Baranovsky was one of the most prolific Russian economists at the turn of the 19–20th centuries. His thought was largely influenced by Western ideas, like most of his fellow Russian economists. But Tugan‑Baranovsky’s theories in turn also influenced Western economic thought...