Renewed interest has been kindled in the status and “meaning” of William T. Thornton (1813–1880) in the history of economic thought. Thornton is often credited, rightly or wrongly, with re-orienting J. S. Mill's thought on the wages fund—a critical cornerstone of classical economics. While Thornton's actual influence on Mill in this matter

I was born in Windsor, Ontario on 25 May 1943, the first child of William Robert Moggridge and Doris Livingston Moggridge. The surname Moggridge comes from Celtic Devon. Add in Livingston and my maternal grandmother's Lennox, the Celtic tinge gets stronger. The Hulls on my paternal grandmother's side reduce it, but there were Camerons in that gene pool. Both of my parents were University of Toronto graduates: my father in Metallurgical Engineering (1934) and my mother in Honours Philosophy and English (1933) and Library Science (1934).

Statistical inferences have long been part of economic inquiry. But how were such inferences made and what logic was employed for them, in particular before the procedures called econometrics were developed? This question is raised in the present paper in relation to the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and in Australia in 1851. Different opinions were soon advanced on whether prices had risen as a result, and statistical inferences were often part of the arguments. I examine the arguments of three economists, William Newmarch (1820–82), John E. Cairnes (1823–75) and W. Stanley Jevons (1835–82), who all wrote about the gold question on several occasions.

Albert Aftalion is certainly one of the best known French economists of the first half of the twentieth century. The influence he exerted during his lifetime over the scientific community of his homeland was considerable, and he was promptly acknowledged abroad to be one of the leading theorists of the business cycle. While he is best known as one of the inventors of the acceleration principle (Haberler 1937), we will focus on Aftalion's endogenous explanation of non-monetary business cycles and, more specifically, on the theoretical framework supporting Les crises périodiques de surproduction. Though this work can be seen as a mere “(desperate) attempt” to reconcile the law of markets with general overproduction (Abraham-Frois 1987), we argue instead that Aftalion's failure to construct an equilibrium theory of aggregate overproduction can be traced back to his inadequate treatment of aggregate demand. According to him, long roundabout processes are what generate cyclical fluctuations within a setting in which commodities produced and brought to the market always find an outlet. In other words, the law of markets implies market clearing where declines in prices instead of involuntary stock-building occur in the event of a crisis. How demand behaves in such a setting requires careful specification, which is precisely what is lacking in Aftalion's model.

The British public debt grew to unprecedented levels during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, and the debt service burden, aggravated by deflation, was reaching alarming heights in the postwar period, absorbing over half of all tax revenue. David Ricardo was prompted by economic analysis and existing circumstances to advocate the rapid redemption of existing public debt by means of a “capital levy,” a one-time tax on the nation's property. In print, he advocated the proposal in “The Funding System,” an entry in a supplementary volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1820, in which he wrote that “by one great effort, we should get rid of one of the most terrible scourges which was ever invented to afflict a nation” (Ricardo 1951–73, IV, p. 197).

The importance of Thomas Robert Malthus's ratios has long been acknowledged. Combined with his use of population figures from America, they gave his first Essay on the Principle of Population the appearance of a scientific study backed by empirical evidence. Prominent economists such as David Ricardo, Nassau Senior, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph A. Schumpeter credited the Essay with being a major work of science. Many scholars have claimed that the trappings of science contributed significantly to the persuasiveness of Malthus's view to his intended readers, who believed that human nature operated according to strict mechanical laws (Rashid 1987, p. 22).

It is now easy to see, in the light of Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were parts of a grand system. Nonetheless, TMS and WN are not tightly linked. This paper pursues the following strategy: knowing that Smith wrote both works, one can go back to westigate Smith's handling of the virtues, and see how that work implicitly defended the acquisitive, commercial society analyzed so thoroughly in WN. In doing so, it will be shown that Smith has a distinctive, key, narrow handling of the virtue justice which is based upon the passion resentment. Smith's treatment of justice explains why there can be no concept of just price in Smith's work. It serves to support market, flexible, or negotiated prices as ethically legitimate because it effectively removes market prices from the domain of government control or responsibility, at least insofar as government is enforcing justice.

The conventional wisdom in economics holds, with Irving Fisher, that interest is explained jointly by the forces of time preference (thrift) and productivity. One school of thought, however, has held stubbornly to the assertion that interest is best understood as a result of time preference alone, time preference as the essential determinant of interest. This is the pure time preference approach to interest. And while most economists are inclined to dismiss this approach out of hand, the pure time preference approach has proved remarkably resilient. Part of the explanation for the persistence of rival theories can be found, not surprisingly, in terminological confusions and ambiguities, for example in deciding among candidates for essential causation. I hope in this article to improve the case for the pure time preference approach to interest by clarifying the argument. It appears that some of the confusion can be attributed to the approach of two theorists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and to their connecting the time preference approach to their particular a priori methodology.