In his Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker alludes to Thomas Malthus's “great contribution” (1988, p. 1) in a prologue to a wider exploratory discussion of some of the implications for macroeconomics flowing from recent programs in family economics. The content of the contribution as represented here (p. 2) includes diminishing returns to increases in employment “when land and other capital are fixed;” population growth positively related to the wage, the lower population growth at low wages turning on reduced birth rates (the preventive check) and increased death rates (the positive check); and a long-run equilibrium wage at which population is constant at a level determined by the production function. Becker emphasizes the stability of the equilibrium wage in the face of disturbances. A catastrophic reduction in population size (eg. the Black Death) and consequently a wage increase will be followed by positive population growth which restores both the wage and population size to their respective equilibrium levels. In the event of increases in the amount of usuable land, population size will become permanently higher with the wage ultimately reduced to its original long-run level. Becker represents Malthus as reaching “much more pessimistic conclusions about the long-term economic prospects of the average family” than, for example, Godwin and Condorcet who had maintained that the economic position of mankind will continue to improve over time.

Economists suffer badly from what we might call “Cliophobia.” Why bother with the history of economic thought?, they ask. Why not just do economics? What is the point of constantly recalling the inadequate economics of yesterday instead of improving the economics of today and tomorrow?

George Berkeley is unusual among economists for his practical dedication. While a great many pamphleteers write about acting for the “public good” it is rare to find someone involved in such acts on an everyday basis.

The ninetieth birthday of Friedrich August von Hayek provides a timely opportunity to reflect upon his contributions to economic thought, not just as a part of the history of ideas but rather as a challenge to today's modes of theorizing.

The purpose of this note is to demonstrate a fundamental inconsistency between Ricardo's theory of wages and his treatment of the occupational structure of wages. This inconsistency arises on two levels'that of the economic reality of Ricardo's day and that of Ricardo's own theoretical schema. It is the latter that will concern us. The importance of Ricardo's theory of wages in the whole Ricardian system is too well-known to require substantiation here. Whether, or to what extent, Ricardo himself was aware of the flaw to be described, is a moot question. His treatment was masterly from the stand-point of avoiding facing up to the inconsistency. At least, those who followed immediately in his footsteps never noticed it, and indeed, it has gone largely unremarked by modern students of Ricardo's work.

A principal objective of Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx was to discover the laws that regulate and limit the growth of the wealth of nations and, in particular, the unprecedented growth of capitalism. The central theme of this paper is that their productive and unproductive labor concepts are critical to understanding their analyses of capitalist growth and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall which regulates and limits this growth. The way in which they identify productive and unproductive labor and how they apply this distinction is critical to understanding the common thread that runs through and marks the differences between them.

The development of economic thinking has seldom taken place entirely independently of developments in other disciplines. There is a long history of interdisciplinary influences among economics, mathematics, physics, biology, and philosophy. Among the most influential of these other disciplines has been physics. Numerous authors have attributed significant influence upon economics to Newtonian mechanics (Taylor 1960, Georgescu-Roegen 1971). The strength of that influence is perhaps best illustrated by William Stanley Jevons's proclamation of his attempt to reconstruct economics as “the mechanics of utility and self interest.“ Frank Knight, having observed what Jevons and others had wrought, concluded that mechanics had become the “sister science” of economics (Knight 1976, p. 85).