Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence—in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a “Chicago school” of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions that ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition, and renewal of the research program in the General Equilibrium Theory (GET), in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we trace the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. We construct a database of GET theorists and apply to this dataset a technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 article, “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958,” was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays. I provide reasons that explain why a long-promised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman’s 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone.

This article explores a debate on the theory of cost that occurred in the 1890s between economist Silas MacVane and Austrian economists. MacVane defended the idea of objective “real cost” and the Austrians argued for subjective opportunity cost. Although this debate is rarely mentioned, it represents a noteworthy episode of active contrast between ideas on value and on cost, with implications that are relevant for contemporary economists. By highlighting the incompatibility of the objective and subjective conceptions of cost, this debate sheds light on the evolution of economic theory. The contributions of relatively unknown authors, such as MacVane and David Green, are also discussed. We interpret the debate in terms of the contrast between research programs based on wealth and on exchange, and note that the gradual shift in the period regarding the fundamental problem that informs economic theory is key to understanding the modern concept of cost.

This paper aims to show how the 100% money proposal, which Irving Fisher came to support in 1935, connects to the rest of his work on monetary instability—in particular, to his credit cycle analysis of 1911 and his debt-deflation theory of 1932–33. Behind these respective analyses, we identify a common explanatory pattern of monetary fluctuations, the “debt–money–prices” triangle, which we use to show how Fisher’s explanations evolved over time, and how his advocacy of 100% money came as a logical conclusion.

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.

In 1901, Correa Moylan Walsh gained renown for writing a groundbreaking monograph on index numbers. His contributions to monetary economics, however, though neglected, transcend his work on index numbers, which was conceived to serve more foundational concerns of his. Therefore, our aim is twofold. First, we want to recover Walsh’s role as an important early twentieth-century economist. Second, we intend to provide a wider account of his incursion into monetary economics. Our argument is that the cornerstone of Walsh’s approach to the science of money is not confined to index numbers but concerns his distinction between different kinds of economic value and the discussion regarding the kind of value that money should measure and store. As such, we identify Walsh’s 1903 book, The Fundamental Problem in Monetary Science, as his archetypical work.

The purpose of the paper is to rescue Irving Fisher’s theorizing of the yield curve (1896, 1907, 1930) from relative obscurity and to contrast it with the better known and equally pioneering theory of John Maynard Keynes (1930, 1936). The paper also adduces evidence that Fed economists and the U.S. monetary experience in the 1920s greatly influenced these authors, both of whom were concerned with the management of the long-term interest rate.

Especially with the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Asian countries have advocated a profound reform of the international financial architecture. Their proposals focused on two main axes: a reform of the global financial system, and stronger regional monetary integration in Asia. There are here significant parallels with the ideas of Robert Triffin (1911–1993). Triffin became famous with trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the international monetary system. The Triffin dilemma is still present among international monetary policy-makers, also in Asia. Triffin put forward several proposals for reforming the global monetary system, but he also developed proposals for regional monetary integration. These were very much based on his experience with the European Payments Union, and focused on the creation of a (European) reserve fund and a (European) currency unit. In this paper we focus on Triffin’s proposals for an Asian payments union in the late 1960s, giving special attention to Japan (in Triffin’s time, the biggest Asian economy; moreover, Triffin had an important Japanese network).

This paper covers the development of the sawtooth wages model, a graphical representation of the behavior of periodically adjusted fixed nominal wages under persistent inflationary conditions. Ranging from the immediate postwar years to the late 1980s, our narrative covers the history of the model, underscoring Bent Hansen’s (1951) contribution, followed by several improvements that aimed to incorporate into inflation theory several institution-specifc traits of underdeveloped economies. The diagram had a lukewarm reception in the 1960s but managed to defend its legacy until the 1980s, as the inertial inflation hypothesis gained terrain in the debate on economic stabilization in Latin America. Under the widespread diffusion of indexation practices, the model was then fully rehabilitated as a workhorse for theoretical and policy analysis in Brazil until a succesful stabilization was achieved in 1994 under the Real plan.

This paper embeds the early political economy of Friedrich August von Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. The urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to stabilize the disintegrating societal orders is identified as a crucial driver behind the parallelisms between Hayek and the ordoliberals. Their shared theoretical position is that in such moments, liberty can thrive sustainably only after a framework of general and stable rules has been established. Hayek’s proximity to ordoliberalism was most explicitly discernible in The Road to Serfdom and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, culminating in the shared politico-economic vision of the competitive order. The contextual nature of Hayek’s ordoliberalism surfaced in the years after The Constitution of Liberty when his focus shifted, along with the postwar intellectual and institutional stabilization of the West: from how stable orders enable liberty, to how liberty enables the evolution of orders.

Environmental and natural resource economics lies inherently at the interface between economic and natural dynamics (e.g., geological constraints, climate change, biodiversity evolution). Building models in that field often means building integrated models, calling on knowledge and methods from economics and physics, climatology, biology, or ecology. Howard Scott Gordon’s 1954 article on fishery economics is considered to be seminal in the history of bioeconomic modeling, integrating biological and economic variables in a microeconomic model. Yet the precise role played by biology in Gordon’s initial work remains unclear. On the basis of archival material and thorough analysis of Gordon’s early research, this paper examines Gordon’s model building and his persistent oscillation between two objectives—the production of a heuristic economic model with standard assumptions, and the conception of a predictive policy tool relevant from a fishery-biology standpoint—and how he finally favored the first over the second. Moreover, contrary to received wisdom, we show that it was not Gordon but biologist Milner B. Schaefer who transformed Gordon’s model into an integrated model. These results shed new light not only on Gordon’s 1954 contribution but also on a whole tradition of integrated environmental and natural resource economics models, based on his work.

In 1970 Herbert Simon was invited by the Sociedad Argentina de Organización Industrial to deliver lectures on “Business Management in the Technological Era.” He asked for an audience with Jorge Luis Borges, the director of the Argentine National Library. Simon had read Borges’s stories and was particularly fascinated by “La Biblioteca de Babel” (The library of Babel), wherein he discovered that Borges, like him, conceived of life as a search through a labyrinth. The Spanish translation of the interview was published in Primera Plana, an Argentine journal. The brief interview sheds light on some of Simon’s ideas about determinism and free will. His critique on maximizing rationality and his suggested approach to decision making have contributed to enlarge the concept of rationality as construed by standard economic theory. Consequently, it may be argued that Simon is incorporating free will in economics. However, though Simon’s position implies an advancement for the role of free will, the whole context of his ideas conditioned it, thus resulting in a “weak” notion of it. During the course of his conversation with Borges, Simon clarified his personal stance, which is consistent with his ideas. The paper will reveal Borges´s and Simon’s understanding of free will. This paper also contains part of the conversation between Simon and Borges that has not been published previously in English. Introducing it in its entirety is a contribution to the knowledge on Borges’s and Simon’s thought.