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...

J.M. Keynes and F. von Hayek had completely different views about the meaning of the term “uncertainty” as it was related to the concept of knowledge. Keynes viewed uncertainty through his concept of the weight of the argument, V, (a logical operator) and weight of the evidence, w (a...

Keynes’s mathematical economics analysis of the Aggregate Supply Function and the Aggregate Supply Curve contained in footnote two on p.55 of the General Theory is correct with the exception of a very minor error that can easily be spotted by anyone who has worked through Keynes’s chapter 20...

Both Smith and Keynes have very similar conceptual approaches to what probability is, how it is used and applied and the areas of application in which it can aid a decision maker. They both accept an interval approach to probability based on inequalities and bounds versus ordinal, subjectivist...

This paper shows how Keynes used the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of one variable input, labor, and one fixed input, capital, to embed expectations of future prices and profits in a micro foundation of the theory of purely competitive firms. Keynes then generalized his technical...

Adam Smith was the first philosopher – economist-political theorist to give a precise definition of uncertainty and then provide his readers with a number of applications of how uncertainty impacts the real economy. Smith even used his uncertainty approach to evaluate his own endeavors. Smith...

This paper provides evidence on how Keynes devised a mathematical framework for his system of probability, which he called «approximation», in A Treatise on Probability, 1921. Keynes used standard conditional, mathematical probability to duplicate Boole’s results in the Challenge problem. He...