This paper provides a comparison between Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s treatments of poverty in a capitalist society. The comparison focus on the different arguments they use to relate poverty to inequality and institutional realities. The discussion points out the life experiences of each...

Amidst the economists that are concerned about the method, it is common to make reference on the subject of a new economic methodology. It was from the deception and the abandon of the search toward a unique criterion to give scientific status to research programmes that this new movement came...

ABSTRACT Phillip Wicksteed’s ideas played an important role in the history of economic methodology. This is because of two reasons: The first was that his views represent the starting point of the deliberate attempt to expel normative issues from marginalist economic analysis. The second...

Given the renewed interest in negative interest rates as method for removing the floor to nominal interest rates, this article offers a concise review of Gesell's life, work and its place in the history of economic thought. It provides a brief biographical sketch of Gesell, demonstrating both...

Der Artikel beschaeftigt sich mit der Bedeutung des Homo oeconomicus fuer die Wirtschaftswissenschaften in der Vergangenheit, der Gegenwart und Zukunft. Quintessenz der Untersuchung ist, dass die wahre Bedeutung des Homo oeconomicus weniger in seiner methodologischen Funktion zu sehen ist, als...

As the heirs to classical political economy and the German historical school, the American institutionalists retained rent theory and its corollary idea of unearned income. More than any other institutionalist, Thorstein Veblen emphasized the dynamics of banks financing real estate speculation...

Given the renewed interest in negative interest rates, this article analyses Gesell’s theory of interest and its connection to J. M. Keynes’ General Theory. Gesell recognised that money has little or no carrying costs in comparison to goods. Therefore, money holders are able to withhold from...

It is traditionally claimed that the State has three main categories of policies to implement: allocation, distribution and stabilization policies. In the present chapter we will be concerned only with stabilization policies or, more generally, with the role public policies may have in...

The theme of academic anti-Semitism has been much discussed recently in histories of the interwar period of the University of Vienna, in particular its Faculty of Law and Policy Sciences. This paper complements these studies by focusing in this regard on the economics chairs at this faculty and,...