As economic planners sought to rebuild Europe in the unstable postwar period, economic expertise was called upon to help in the drawing of national budgets and to inform economic and planning policies. A tool that circulated from academia to economic administrations was the input-output...

Wassily Leontief met with decades of success for the development of input-output analysis, and yet he remained a staunch critic of the economics profession throughout his life. To understand his success, its limits, and the origins of his discontent, I separate the scientific activities of...

In the 1950s, Jacques Rueff's references to social order seem pretty clear: it is not a spontaneous phenomena. Although Rueff is generally seen as a liberal economist, this has prompted commentators to see in his approach something more artificial than Hayek's own ideas on social order. Hayek...

This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a 'bad' equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to increase...

Chapter 1. Looking for dynamic economics: Tinbergen’s early breakthrough -- Chapter 2. Relaxation oscillations in the early development of econometrics: a road not taken -- Chapter 3. Frisch’s macro-dynamics: inner stability and external impulses -- Chapter 4. Kalecki’s macro-dynamics:...

Although Leontief was and still is one of the most recognized names in economics, inextricably linked to the development of input-output techniques, he remained fiercely critical of other economists’ works and of the state of economic science during his whole life. To understand his...