Mit seinem Hauptwerk "Political Arithmetick" legte William Petty die Grundlage der modernen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsstatistik und der soziologischen Sozial-Berichterstattung. Sein Begriff der "politischen Arithmetik" konnte sich allerdings gegen den vom europäischen Kontinent stammenden Begriff...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

Ragnar Frisch's concept of econometrics was broader in scope than the more restricted connotation it has today as a sub-discipline of economics, it may be more properly rendered as a reconstruction of economics along principles inspired and drawn from natural sciences. In this reconstruction an...

Hayek's approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticized because it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paper this criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution. The...

This paper revisits Keynes's liquidity preference theory as it evolved from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and after, with a view of assessing the theory's ongoing relevance and applicability to issues of both monetary theory and policy. Contrary to the neoclassical "special case"...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

The interest-rate controversies between Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher have attracted little attention and, in the opinion of most commentators, justifiably so. Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher argue over what appear to be two minor issues – Böhm-Bawerk's claims that his third cause of interest (productivity...

The paper provides a careful, analytical account of Trygve Haavelmo's unsystematic, but important, use of the analogy between controlled experiments common in the natural sciences and econometric techniques. The experimental analogy forms the linchpin of the methodology for passive observation...

This paper examines Mark Blaug's position on the normative character of Paretian welfare economics: in general, and specifically with respect to his debate with Pieter Hennipman over this question during the 1990s. The paper also clarifies some of the confusions that emerged within the context...