Journal of the History of Economic Thought最新文献

{"title":"John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, What Capitalism Needs: Forgotten Lessons of Great Economists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 299, $28.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108487825.","authors":"Ola Innset","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000220","url":null,"abstract":"Marshallianism. The othermain idea of the author is related to the consequences of themigration of the most important economists of the time fromEurope to the United States. That migration, which occurred in the 1930s, due to thewell-known political circumstances, had de facto determined a process of theoretical “colonialism,” which had a double effect: on one side, it unified the American economic thought, and, on the other side, it shaped the present mainstream economics. I guess that this process likely will be described in the following Volume III. The combination of these two ideas is a key point for the community of historians of economics. By following Marchionatti’s suggestion, we might consider whether the origin of the present mainstream economics is truly a process of deconstruction and rebuilding of Marshallianism under the American eyes, or whether it has a more complicated origin that cannot ignore the complexity of the economic theory that spread between the two sides of the pond up to 1945 and that should be described in a more sophisticated way. Furthermore, as historians of economic ideas, shall we subscribe to the author’s “Eurocentric” vision? Or shall we make some distinctions that include the peculiarity of American economic thought? These questions remain open, and Volume III will likely help readers to add further relevant elements in order to discuss them and maybe to find some plausible answers as well as to address new ones to the community of historians of economics. Hence, we praise Marchionatti’s efforts and insights and acknowledge him for giving us this opportunity for an open discussion on these fundamental aspects of the history of economics.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48953864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"LETTER TO THE EDITOR: WAS SMITH A STAGE THEORIST? A RESPONSE TO AHIAKPOR","authors":"M. Paganelli","doi":"10.1017/S105383722200030X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S105383722200030X","url":null,"abstract":"James Ahiakpor claims I am incorrect in my reading of Adam Smith when I suggest that Smith may not endorse, or may even reject, a four stages of development model, given his absence of historical example of any country that developed following the four stages, but rather that his descriptions of different stages look more like a taxonomy to describe different types of societies. I very much appreciate the time and energy Ahiakpor put on my work and I have no qualm about his reading of my paper. Since I was asked to reply to his detailed comments, I will. But only in a general, methodological, way. The beauty ofAdamSmith’s works, inmy view, is their complexity and theirmultiple shades. I do not see Smith as a black and white writer but as someone who sees the gray areas. And his focus on the gray may be what allows centuries of debates andmultiple, if not contradicting, interpretations. The way I see Smith is that he is aware of the complexity of economic phenomena, which may very well have multiple and possibly unknown causes and explanations. The role of the “philosopher,” or social scientist, is to try to understand and elaborate them. But trying to understand them does not necessarily imply finding the one and only truth behind them, which, for Smith, may not be available to us, or not even be there. As Smith tells us in his History of Astronomy, we want to connect the dots, we want to come up with an explanation for things that happen around us. But there are different ways of connecting the same dots. And there may even be different dots to connect. And so, differently from THE Theory of Moral Sentiments, we do not have THE Theory of the Wealth of Nations, or THE Theory of the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. We have AN Inquiry into it. So, maybe presumptuously, I would hope I follow Smith’s spirit of inquiring and simply offer a different way of connecting the dots from Ronald Meek or Ahiakpor, not the one and only correct way of understanding Smith. Scholars have given different emphases to different sentences or words in Smith. Ahiakpor emphasizes different words and different sentences fromwhat I do. In a sense I completely agree with him that, in Smith, saving and the accumulation of capital are at the base of growth, or that different government policies will have a major effect in the development of a country. And I can also see how he “infers” (his word) a development in stages from it. But in my reading of Smith, I preferred to emphasize a different","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48983831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"LETTER TO THE EDITOR: A COMMENT ON MARIA PIA PAGANELLI’S MISTAKEN TREATMENT OF ADAM SMITH’S “FOUR STAGES” THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT","authors":"James C. W. Ahiakpor","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000293","url":null,"abstract":"Three principal problems with Maria Pia Paganelli’s (2022) treatment of Adam Smith’s “Four Stages” theory of (socio-)economic development are, first, her doubting whether Smith argues the “four stages” theory or a “stadial model” of economic development; second, her preference for only the equivalent of time-series data to evaluate Smith’s four stages theory; and third, her misrepresenting several of Smith’s arguments in theWealth of Nations (hereinafterWN). From these flaws in her analysis and ignoring the development economics literature that appreciates the relevance of Smith’s explanations, Paganelli invites us to inquire again into the causes of the wealth of nations since Smith has failed in that effort: “when none of the empirical data fits our stadial model of economic development, maybe it is time to inquire again into what causes nations to develop and grow richer” (2022, p. 98; italics original). She also appears not to have paid much attention to Smith’s explanation in the “Introduction and Plan of the Work” of his goals in the five books of the Wealth of Nations, namely: (a) to explain the “causes of [the] improvement, in the productive powers of labour, and the order, according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of [people] in society” (WN, pp. 10 11); (b) to “explain in what has constituted the revenue of the great body of the people, or what has been the nature of these funds which, in different ages and nations, have supplied their annual consumption” (p. 11); and (c) to explain the proper role of government in the economic development process. Paganelli’s arguments are thus incorrect and misleading. My comment elaborates.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47010797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jeff E. Biddle, Progression through Regression: The Life Story of the Empirical Cobb-Douglas Production Function (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. xii + 334, $110 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108492263.","authors":"Chung-Tang Cheng","doi":"10.1017/s1053837222000232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1053837222000232","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44373697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SMITH AT 300: ON REGULATION OF THE LABOUR CONTRACT","authors":"T. Aspromourgos","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000463","url":null,"abstract":"“Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters. Thus the law which obliges the masters in several different trades to pay their workmen in money and not in goods, is quite just and equitable” (Smith 1976 [1776]), I.x.c.61, pp. 157–158).","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45151332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roger E. Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard, and Tamotsu Nishizawa, eds., Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values: Revisiting the History of Welfare Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. ix + 338, £75 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108841450.","authors":"Herrade Igersheim","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000335","url":null,"abstract":"This collective book edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard, and Tamotsu Nishizawa is a valuable outcome from the ongoing project “Welfare Economists and the Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” which also gave rise to several workshops between 2013 and 2017. It brings together thirteen chapters with a substantial introduction and conclusion by the three editors. It is a book that proposes a thesis, a rare and difficult achievement for a collective work. Specifically, the claim made in the book is the following: “whether we are talking about old, new or contemporary welfare economics, when economists have tackled practical problems, they have adopted a much broader range of ethical judgements beyond welfarism” (p. 1). To better understand the stakes and the scope of this claim, one may turn to Philippe Mongin (2002), whose famous essay “Is There Progress in Normative Economics?” is a reference to the history of welfare economics. Mongin proposes in particular to distinguish several stages in the history of welfare economics (on this subject, see also Baujard 2016): while the first stage corresponds to the first welfare economics and the second stage corresponds to the new welfare economics, “the third stage corresponds roughly to two different forms of normative economics, that is, social choice theory on the one hand, and public economics on the other” (Mongin 2002, p. 147). Having stated this, he adds:","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57109204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roberto Marchionatti, Economic Theory in the Twentieth Century, An Intellectual History. Volume II, 1919–1945: Economic Theory in an Age of Crisis and Uncertainty (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. xiii + 428, $149.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 9783030809867.","authors":"G. Becchio","doi":"10.1017/S105383722200027X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S105383722200027X","url":null,"abstract":"Hayek, Friedrich A. 1990. Denationalisation of Money–The Argument Refined. Third edition. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Pack, Spencer J. 2022. The Political Economy and Feasibility of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies: Insights from the History of Economic Thought. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Ricardo, David. 1955. The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Volume X: Biographical Miscellany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waterman, Anthony. 2015. “Review of Cremaschi, ‘Utilitarianism andMalthus’s Virtue Ethics.’”History of Economic Ideas 23 (1):189–192.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42546842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"COBWEB THEORY, MARKET STABILITY, AND PRICE EXPECTATIONS","authors":"Geoffrey Poitras","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000116","url":null,"abstract":"Contributors to cobweb theory include many leading economists of the twentieth century. From early beginnings in 1930, cobweb theory played a key role in evolving perceptions of market stability arising from recursive linear models with endogenous dynamics. The focal point of this evolution in cobweb theory is the transition from naive to adaptive to rational price expectations. After a review of the prehistory, this paper examines the first wave of linear cobweb theory initiated by Jan Tinbergen, Henry Schultz, and Umberto Ricci and proceeds to consider the evolution of price expectations in the second wave of cobweb models associated with endogenous cycles in commodity markets. The role of modern cobweb theory in discussions about the stability of market equilibrium and the connection to processes with rational expectations is assessed.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46066331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE “SOCIAL VALUE” DEBATE: AN EARLY CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN MARGINALISM","authors":"L. Fiorito","doi":"10.1017/s1053837221000626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1053837221000626","url":null,"abstract":"This paper provides a reconstruction of the debate on “social value” among early marginalists in the US. This will be done in three steps. The first step analyzes John B. Clark’s approach to social value as presented in his Distribution of Wealth; the second step deals with other influential contemporaries who adopted a similar social value perspective, with a main focus on Edwin R. A. Seligman; the third step discusses those critics who, with due differences in emphasis and style, animated the debate over social value, reviewing (among others) the contributions of Herbert J. Davenport, Joseph Schumpeter, Benjamin Anderson, John Maurice Clark, and George P. Watkins. The final section presents some conclusions.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57108515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thibault Le Texier, La main visible des marchés: Une histoire critique du marketing (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2022), pp. 656, €26 (paperback). ISBN: 9782707299249.","authors":"Kevin Mellet","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000396","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43318669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}