This paper discusses Joan Robinson’s remarks on the importance of historical time in economic analysis. On the one hand, Joan Robinson expressed skepticism with equilibrium analysis as such, arguing that as soon as economists take into account the uncertainty of expectations, history needs to...

Edmond Malinvaud’s case is peculiar in the history of Macro as he committed to two different microfoundational programs, namely the disequilibrium theory (more properly, the non-Walrasian approach) and the practice of large-scale macroeconomic modeling. Such a twofold commitment was far from...

No other phrase has been as widely and as controversially used in the discussion of capitalism and markets as the ‘invisible hand', a metaphor that Adam Smith used just once in each of his major works. There has been a debate as to whether Smith himself attached any importance to this...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

Abstract: Frank Knight was an enigmatic thinker: not only about economics, but also about individual and social behavior more generally, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and a number of other subjects. However, his views on some topics often created tensions with his views on other...

This paper evaluates the contribution of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit to the development ofeconomic theory in the 20th century. Our argument in this paper is twofold. First, we contend thatthis book embodied what had been the common knowledge of early neoclassical economics priorto WWII....

This paper examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called ‘the middle of the road' to – seemingly – stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the...

Italian Abstract: La pubblicazione dei "Miti e paradossi della giustizia tributaria" nel 1938 diede origine a un importante dibattito epistemologico tra Einaudi e Fasiani. In Miti e paradossi, i progetti "utili" sono considerati come parte di un approccio scientifico, e la scienza può avere ad...

Keynes was adamant that the assumption of homogeneous output and capital in macroeconomic theory is inadmissable. His aggregate supply or Z function is a generalisation of Marshall's ordinary supply function to take account of heterogeneous output, and is an essential element of the principle of...