In this paper, we analyse Hayek’s views on endogenous preferences. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of his remarks that economists ought to take people’s preferences as given, there are several places in Hayek’s economics and political economy where preference endogeneity plays a...

Unlike standard accounts, recent research in the history of macroeconomics has given increasing attention to the Old Keynesians’ criticisms of the New Classical Economics. In this paper, I address the case of Edmond Malinvaud, who began opposing the latter from the early 1980s and did so...

Macroeconomics is said to exert a decisive influence on policy-makers/-making through economic expertise. This influence is usually assumed or taken for granted in- and outside academic circles. Yet, the reverse proposal, i.e. policy-makers’ influence on macroeconomics, appears to be far less...

This paper discusses Joan Robinson’s remarks on the importance of historical time in economic analysis. On the one hand, Joan Robinson expressed skepticism with equilibrium analysis as such, arguing that as soon as economists take into account the uncertainty of expectations, history needs to...

Edmond Malinvaud’s case is peculiar in the history of Macro as he committed to two different microfoundational programs, namely the disequilibrium theory (more properly, the non-Walrasian approach) and the practice of large-scale macroeconomic modeling. Such a twofold commitment was far from...

No other phrase has been as widely and as controversially used in the discussion of capitalism and markets as the ‘invisible hand', a metaphor that Adam Smith used just once in each of his major works. There has been a debate as to whether Smith himself attached any importance to this...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished.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...

Abstract: Frank Knight was an enigmatic thinker: not only about economics, but also about individual and social behavior more generally, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and a number of other subjects. However, his views on some topics often created tensions with his views on other...

This paper evaluates the contribution of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit to the development ofeconomic theory in the 20th century. Our argument in this paper is twofold. First, we contend thatthis book embodied what had been the common knowledge of early neoclassical economics priorto WWII....

This paper examines how Samuelson defined his own role as an economist as a technical expert, who walked what he called ‘the middle of the road' to – seemingly – stay out of the realm of politics. As point of entry I discuss the highly tempting offers made by Theodore M. Schultz in the...