Paul Samuelson proposed and practiced a program for the Whig history of economics. One such example is his account of Frank Ramsey's contribution to optimal taxation in 1927. For him and mainly for the public finance economists who rediscovered later Ramsey's contribution, Ramsey was a genius...

Our main contention is that two different re-conceptualizations of liberal democracy took place among Chicago economists in the postwar period. The first emerged out of Frank H. Knight's ruminations in the 1930s on the failures of liberalism. By the 1940s, Knight devoted most of his attention to...

Surely just about everyone in the U.S. federal income tax field has heard of Henry Simons, if only for his famous definition of “personal income.” Few realize, however, that this proponent of “drastic progression” in a broad-based income tax was also a self-described libertarian who...

This paper considers the idea of informality in market exchange, as introduced into the economic development literature by Keith Hart in the 1970s. In addition to Hart (1971, 1973) it will discuss three writers who may be considered his intellectual forerunners. Each, to a greater or less...

Was the Keynesian message alive during the second half of the XXth Century, or was it betrayed by his followers? This article in the fields of the history of economic thought and methodology contrasts the Scientific Research Programmes (SRPs), a Lakatosian concept, of Keynes in The General...

Financial market crises with the threat of a subsequent debt-deflation depression have occurred with increasing regularity in the United States from 1980 through the present. Almost reflexively, when confronted with such circumstances, US institutions and the policymakers that run them have...

The article is part of the special issue of the journal on Charles P. Kindleberger (CPK). It is here reported one of CPK's articles published in Moneta e Credito (vol. 33 n. 131, settembre 1980, pp. 253-58). The article presents a short piece of scientific autobiography by Kindleberger, and it...

Although there are several variants of innovation economics at play in the current antitrust literature, the federal judiciary and enforcement agencies as well as a number of Chicago Schoolers have recognized the importance of policy they all associate with the economist Joseph Schumpeter,...

During his honours research on an index of industrial production at the University of Western Australia, Salter gained an understanding of the composite commodity theorem. The applied work on the index of industrial production provided him with the analytic foundations for his two famous...

This paper was presented as the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Economics Research Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama. In this lecture, I look at a debate in the 1960s between Frank H. Knight, the subject of my new book (2016) in Palgrave Macmillan's Great...