Few eighteenth century practitioners of political economy have been as misunderstood or stereotyped as Benjamin Franklin. His economic essays which spanned a sixty-one year period (1729-1790), still create disagreement among scholars even on the doctrinal origins of Franklin's economic ideas. If...

Bruce Caldwell (2004) “Hayek’s Challenge” tells the story of the evolution of Hayek’s methodological standpoint. In Caldwell’s account, Hayek is driven by the desire to identify a truly scientific approach to the study of society as a complex adaptive order which at the same time will...

Giocoli (2003) won awards from ESHET and, in its original form as Giocoli’s PhD thesis, from HES. It lives up to its promise. According to Giocoli, in the period between the 1890s and the 1980s a transformation took place in the way that economists thought about what it was that they were...

This paper develops a classification scheme of the many different definitions of elasticities of substitution and complementarity in the production case based on duality, gross and net substitution, elasticity type, and four different basic concepts of substitution and complementarity is...

This paper was originally presented at a conference on value organized by the Laboratory for Social Change in Rome, which staged a debate on value theory involving Andrew Kliman, Alan Freeman, Mino Carchedi, Gary Mongiovi, Fabio Petri, Duncan Foley, and Ernesto Screpanti. The paper was a...

In the 19th and 20th centuries economists of the German and Swedish language areas strongly influenced each other and made significant contributions to the development and critique of neoclassical economics. In our paper, we focus on the prominent contributions of Wicksell, Cassel, Hayek and...

In this paper we propose a broad survey of the main trends in the history of economic thought relative to education and human capital and try to assess whether progress has been made or not. If the main intuitions regarding the link between education and the economy were already present at the...

After Smith’s statement of the market virtues the process of gestation of economic policy as a consistent set of rules for public agenda has been rather slow. Until not so long ago economic policy as a discipline was confined to prescribing practical rules intended to explain technical...

Through the lens of the three books under review, this essay documents the contemporary rise in income and wealth inequality in the United States, evaluates competing explanations for it, and then turns its attention to post efforts by economists and philosophers to understand the consequences...

This paper reviews the historical roots of Marx's labor theory of value and some contemporary contributions to the critique of this theory. Modern commentary on Marx's labor theory of value based on dual system of parallel prices and embodied labor coefficients loses sight of the theory's roots...