Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian tracts The Principles of Morals and Legislation and In Defense of Usury contains an explicit attack on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations on pages 8-23 in chapter Two of The Principles of Morals and Legislation, as well as on...

The claim made to Robert Skidelsky by Richard Kahn, published in Skidelsky’s 1992 second volume of his autobiography of Keynes, that “…he recalled Keynes himself as being a poor mathematician by 1927…”, is in direct conflict with Kahn’s 1936 reply to Neisser, that "My own ideas were...

The Townshend–Keynes exchanges over decision making, weight of the argument (evidence), non numerical probabilities (Keynes’s term for Boole’s constituent probabilities, used in The Laws of Thought in 1854, that appears on page 163 of the A Treatise on Probability in chapter 15 on inexact...

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided a general analysis of virtue ethics (prudence, temperance, courage, justice, benevolence, where Smith combined the virtues of temperance and courage into the virtue of self command) that was applied to all areas of a human society...

Both Confucius and Augustine present very similar type arguments about how we can be happy in this life. Both, like Smith after them, reject the utilitarian claim that wealth, money and riches will make one happy. Smith’s argument is more detailed and longer. However, they all arrive at the...

Augustine’s argument about the failure of wealth to insure one’s happiness is very similar to Adam Smith’s position except that Augustine compares a lower income or middle income class citizen with a rich citizen while Smith compares a lower income class citizen,or poor citizen, with a...

Starting with J. Muth’s unsupported and unsupportable claims, originally made in 1961, that “rational expectations” were subjective probability distributions that were distributed around a known, true, objective probability distribution, various economists have provided the same type of...

A major source of confusion about Keynes’s Liquidity Preference theory of the rate of interest is the failure of readers of the General Theory to recognize that chapter 13 is an introductory chapter that lays the ground work and foundations for chapter 15. Keynes’s actual theory is presented...

In August 1937, Keynes discovered that Pigou, with the very explicit and rabid support of Dennis Robertson, was planning on publishing a paper in the Economic Journal which deployed the same type of Marshallian, partial equilibrium,ceteris paribus (constant money income) analysis with functions...

There simply is no way that Richard Cantillon, in his Essai (1755), can be assessed as being, in any way close to, much less the equal of, Adam Smith as an economic theorist. Adam Smith made uncertainty, as opposed to the linear risk concept based on the mathematical laws of the probability...