Ronald Coase (1910-2013), who sadly died at the remarkable age of 102, made significant contributions to economics based on common sense and the detailed study of his topics. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance...

The present essay addresses the epistemic difficulties involved in achieving consensus with respect to the Hayek-Keynes debate. It is argued that the debate cannot be settled on the basis of the observable evidence; or, more precisely, that the empirical implications of the relevant theories are...

Using information collected from American Economic Review publications of the last 100 years, we try to provide answers to various questions: Which are the top AER publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top AER papers based on citation success? How frequently is someone able to...

This paper focuses on Ludwig von Mises methodological apriorism. It uses Wittgenstein’s private language argument as the basis for a critique of Mises’s claim to have found apodictically certain foundations for economic analysis. It is argued instead that Mises’s methodology is more...

The aim of this paper is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between, say, 1887 and 1971. In particular, it is argued that economics embraced a technocratic...

This paper compares and contrasts the hermeneutic turn advocated by Don Lavoie in this 1985 essay on The Interpretive Dimension of Economics with the ontological turn that was gathering momentum amongst other groups of heterodox economists at about the same time. It is argued that an explicit...

In Appreciation and Interest Irving Fisher (1896) derived an equation connecting interest rates in any two standards of value. The original Fisher equation (OFE) was expressed in terms of the expected appreciation of money [percent change in E(1/P)] whereas the ubiquitous conventional Fisher...

This is the first of two essays on the influences of Peter Drucker’s exposure to proponents of the Austrian School of economics on his writing and philosophical views. In this essay, I review the major influences that appear to have shaped much of his thinking, focusing mainly on post-World...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is rarely mentioned in the history of economic thought. For a long time his criticism of market economy has been described as a defense of an agricultural society with no relation with the outer world that could even be considered as anchored in the past. Maybe one of the...

Milton Friedman’s “The Methodology of Positive Economies” is still one of the most widely read pieces on economic methodology. One reason for this might be Friedman’s attractive proposal that economists use theories and hypotheses as pragmatic devices to summarize data and make...