Pareto based his interpretation of business cycles on a disaggregated general equilibrium system with dynamics determined by frictions (or “inertia”). The present article investigates his interpretation of the motion of the economic aggregate, in the sense of the set of individual consumers...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the “growthmen” of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow’s seminal...

Albert Einstein came to The California Institute of Technology in early 1933 and delivered a speech on the causes of the ongoing economic depression. Soon after that, Irving Fisher sent the German physicist his recent book Booms and Depressions, depicting the crisis as a monetary phenomenon. An...

Wicksell discussed in his 1893 book Value, capital and rent, as part of a critical comment on Launhardt and Jevons, conditions for consistent aggregation. He argued that Jevons’s trading body concept was only valid if identical linear marginal utility functions (with ensuing parallel Engel...

The methodology of Latin American economic structuralism has been generally interpreted as an implicit extension of classic French structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, without careful examination of the methodological pronouncements of Latin American economists and social...

This paper was prepared for a symposium about Erwin Dekker’s (2021) recent biography of the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, with attention to Tinbergen’s work as a development economist in the post-war era. Tinbergen’s “uniqueness” among other development economists is discussed, as...

This paper provides an overview of Brazilian economists’ contributions to global economics since mid 20th century, from the perspective of economics as transnational science. The contributions are organized into three sections, after a methodological and historiographical introduction:...

The paper brings to light an article by Knut Wicksell published in Swedish in 1908 about the American crisis of 1907. Wicksell explicitly distinguished, apparently for the first time in the literature, three features of a healthy banking system: Solvency, liquidity, and versatility. The paper...

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky’s 1916 seminal study about the working of cooperatives in a capitalist environment, which, due to historical and linguistic circumstances, has left only a limited trace in the subsequent economic literature in the...