From this same rostrum several years ago, outgoing president Bill Barber (1990, p. 110) said that presidential addresses tend to fall into one of two broad categories. Category I speeches typically survey the state of the art, identify promising directions for future research, and attempt to justify our scholarly existence to skeptics who doubt the value of studying the world of dead economists. Category II speeches draw their form and substance from the speaker's particular research interests.

Karl Marx's theory of land rent plays a minor role in his overall economic system but provides us with a good opportunity to examine and score his analytic powers and attained understanding. The conclusion arrived at from the present reinvestigation confirms, I fear, the diagnosis that Marx was an autodidact who lacked mastery of the subject matter that he so confidently grappled with. Objective readers of my analysis can form their own judgments of Marx's written logic and empirical contentions.

According to the folklore of economics, H. L. Moore (1869–1958) in Economic Cycles: Their Law and Cause (1914) mistakenly called his estimates of the supply of pig iron the demand for pig iron. The reviews of Economic Cycles by R. A. Lehfeldt (1915) and P. G. Wright (1915) initiated the folklore, which G. J. Stigler (1962) repeated in his obituary of Moore. Recently the folklore reappeared in histories of economics by M. Blaug (1986), K. Kim (1988), R. J. Epstein (1989), and M. S. Morgan (1990). Morgan, who was particularly critical of Moore, wrote that his empirical work “produced a relationship which he interpreted as a positive demand curve for pig-iron. This, of course, contradicted the negative relationship between the price and quantity stipulated by standard economic theory…. Moore's approach was a mixture. At its worst, it involved both the unthinking application of theory to data and the adoption of empirically derived relationships without reference to theory” (Morgan 1990, pp. 28, 141).

Between 1830 and 1860, Germany provided the world with some of the pioneers of marginalism. Johann Heinrich von Thünen and Hermann Heinrich Gossen are shining examples. Then German theory declined. The center of German-language theory shifted to Vienna, and from 1885 to 1930 the German academic establishment, dominated by the Historical School, was virtually cut off from the progress of mainstream economics. Things began to change around 1930; German economists started again to make original contributions. By the end of the war, they had provided Germany with a solid link to the mainstream. Except for Erich Schneider, nobody contributed as much to this development as Heinrich von Stackelberg.

Ronald Coase's 1960 article, “The Problem of Social Cost,” has been one of the most influential works in the development of welfare economics since A. C. Pigou's The Economics of Welfare. Principally, the article made the definition and distribution of property rights a central issue when discussing the efficiency problems of negative externalities. Coase's approach has given rise to most of the economics of tort law and alternative liability rules. It has also led to the development of the “property rights” approach to environmental economics that has found prominence as an alternative to traditional Pigovian analysis.

Though beauty of diction, harmony of periods, and acuteness and singularity of sentiment, may captivate the reader, yet there are other qualifications essentially necessary…. Fidelity, accuracy and impartiality are also requisite (Joseph Towers, Observations on Mr. Hume's History (1778)).

Many authors have interpreted Nassau Senio's ideas on abstinence through the years to mean that a cause/effect relation exists between interest and abstinence and that interest is the reward for abstinence. Some typical examples of this treatment are as follows: “The original abstinence theory of interest for which Senior is famous has long been recognized as the most complete of the classical theories, and under various names has become incorporated in the general corpus of economic theory” (Bowley 1937, p. 137). “Nassau Senior…introduced the ‘abstinence theory’ of interest, and he is criticized both for its one-sidedness and for using it to imply that the ‘pain’ of the capitalist is in some sense proportional to the ‘reward’ he ‘earns’ by abstaining. On page 189 of Political Economy, Senior describes abstinence as the cause of interest in terms which would readily explain this general interpretation, and in his public-policy pronouncements he further supports it” (Conard 1959, p. 26). “Senior's contribution to capital theory was to identify this reward for ‘abstinence’ as interest, or the cost of waiting, during which time capital could be accumulated. Senior's description of interest as a return to abstinence was his most original contribution to economics, and it soon became assimilated into the mainstream of economic theory. In it he surpassed Smith, Malthus and Ricardo and his analysis of capital and interest stood as the most complete in British economics until the time of Jevons” (Ekelund and Hébert 1975, p. 103).

Two years after her success in the Moral Sciences Tripos (two examiners placed her in the First class and two in the Second), Mary Paley was asked to write an economics textbook for Extension Lecture students. On her engagement, the book became a joint effort with her fiance, later husband, Alfred Marshall. It was published in October 1879 and reprinted nine times between 1879 and 1891, including a revised edition in 1881. A third edition was worked on, probably around 1885, but not published. According to John Maynard Keynes, 15,000 copies of the book were sold in all (Pigou 1925, p. 500). Sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, Marshall rejected the book, criticizing its elementary nature and brevity—it was impossible, he felt, “to tell the truth for half-a-crown” (M. P. Marshall 1947, p. 22). When he sent his brother-in-law, E. D. Guillebaud, a complimentary copy of the Principles in 1890, Marshall stipulated that the Economics of Industry must be returned for destruction (Guillebaud 1961,2, p. 12, note c). In 1892 he produced a small book “made chiefly by scissors and paste out of my Principles,” which on its spine bore the title Economics of Industry.