The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was founded in 1920 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the leading economic research organizations in the world. The NBER still exists today and still enjoys a high reputation, but the NBER of today bears little resemblance to the organization it once was. Between 1920 and the present the NBER has undergone a number of significant changes in form, function, and direction, and this history is one that includes moments of considerable drama. There were times of great financial stress, to the point where the future existence of the organization was in doubt, times when the organization seemed to be able to maintain a highly favored financial status despite outside criticism, and times of sharp conflict between the Bureau and its financial patrons.

The corpus of Jewish legal writings contains many discussions of economic issues and ideas. Yet, aside from a small group of scholars, historians of economics have tended to ignore the texts of Jewish law. As Ephraim Kleiman (1997) points out, the sheer size and inaccessibility of the Jewish law corpus presents a major barrier. Economic ideas are scattered across a vast amount of material. The canonical text of Jewish law is the Talmud, which spans 2,700 folio pages and two million words. Hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Talmud (or parts of it). There are three major codes of Jewish Law (based on the Talmud and selected commentaries), plus commentaries on the codes and lesser known codes (based on the major codes). About one million responsa (questions and answers in Jewish law) are known to exist; these are collected in hundreds of books. Today, new commentaries and responsa appear each year, in addition to multiple rabbinic journals. In order to understand these materials, the scholar must be well versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the reading of the Talmud.

Juan Noyola is widely credited as an originator of the Latin American “structuralist” theory of inflation. His key contribution is a 1956 article comparing inflation in Mexico and Chile. However there is disagreement about the nature of this contribution, or even what “structuralist” means in this context. I argue that Noyola's innovation was grounding money and credit in a highly institutional political economy of class conflict. This grounding endogenized not only money, but also policymaking and the State.

The ancient Greeks were admired for many things, but particularly for their lack of the corrosive, self-centered complex that leads many authors today to believe that everything started with, and everything originated in, Greece. The ancient Greeks were self-confident enough to accept that they had been influenced by and had absorbed many foreign elements, which their talent then transformed into a new expression of civilization. At a somewhat less mundane level, many ideas that have shaped our thoughts and continue to influence our thinking today, across the world, originated in the past. They were also debated from different points of view in Athens and in other areas in Greece.