... and, through it, paradoxically, the legitimacy afforded to capital and interest, are the main themes of the book, and recur in Rerum Novarum . Some of the anomalies of the Encyclical—for example, the fact that while its nominal subject is the industrial society, it seems to deal with a preindustrial world—can...

... agenda in economics. His two major articles in this field seem to be unrelated. A common impression from these works and from Ramsey's interaction with other economists is that he was mostly a mathematician who was distracted by economists who from time to time sought his help with certain problems. Here...

... state of capital accumulation does not necessarily imply a stationary state of human improvement. However, he seemed to argue that in China these two types of stationary states have a mutual effect upon each other. Correspondence may be addressed to Yue Xiao by email: [email protected]...

... inference. At first sight, this seems very much in the line of Lorraine Das-ton and Peter Galison’s account of objectivity. They argue that in the twentieth century the awareness arose that mechanical-objective pictures still could contain errors that should be erased by trained judgement. Gal-ton’s case...

... to better our condition, combined with freedom and the security of the law. The propensity to better our condition is grounded in our vanity and can take the form of both parsimony and prodigality. The laws that guarantee freedom and security seem to be more of an accident of history than deliberate...

...Andrea Salanti A recent exchange between the late Mark Blaug and Heinz Kurz and Neri Salvadori on the relevance of Sraffian economics (and a significant amount of more orthodox approaches, for that matter) does not seem to offer conclusive arguments, mainly because both contenders share some...

..., Ricardo drastically simplified the method of proof of his main proposition, which otherwise seemed to present impossible analytical challenges. The irony is that the proposition was correct, quite independently of the labor theory of value, but Ricardo was just unable to prove it. Correspondence may...

... reipublicae ,” which has been freely translated as the healing power of society. This article aims to explain the meaning and significance given by Malthus in his theory of population to these two concepts. Their essential role in preventing or remedying overpopulation does not seem to have received adequate...

...Joost Hengstmengel Abstract The years 1904–5 seemed to mark the birth of neo-Calvinist political economy in the Netherlands. It was then that three jurists affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam, an institution founded by the theologian Abraham Kuyper, published their first economic...

...Stefano Toso In conclusion, it seems to us that even M. de la Palisse could summarize with short and precise arguments the issue of whether, and when, public debts burden present or future generations.—Maffeo Pantaleoni, “Imposta e prestito in riguardo alla loro pressione” Dipartimento di...

... result has direct and devastating consequences for the Berg-son-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised...

... articles in the same journal (1903, 1910, 1913), explored in great detail the impact of third-party consumption on an individual's utility function and, potentially, on social welfare. In fact, in such cases, the derivation of the market demand curve, and even the very notion of consumer surplus, seemed...

... that these are not images in the sense that maps are. The story of Boulding, an admirer of maps and strong believer in visual reasoning, who moved away from economics to become a general social scientist in the late 1940s, seems to confirm the above assessment. Yet, the difference between economists and other social...

...Floris Heukelom To understand the relationship between experimental and behavioral economics, we need to go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1970s, psychologists began conducting new kinds of experiments, the results of which seemed to falsify the assumption of rational individual...

... “scientific” and “religious” knowledge protected each from the other for a while. But Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory seemed to destroy that distinction, and so to discredit religion and theology. A variety of strategies for relating economics to theology has been adopted since that time by those...

... of the twentieth century. We show that aggregating heterogeneous pieces of observation is necessary— even though it might seem paradoxical—and it requires the statistician be a very cunning observer. Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 This essay was supported by the French National Agency...

... are not the center of the moral universe. In contemporary presentations and popularizations of astronomical theories the realization is that literally we, on Earth, are not the center of the physical universe. Adam Smith's theory of moral development, and therefore his moral defense of commercial societies, seems...

... is that HOPE has always been more pluralistic than current members of the profession, who often see the journal as a stronghold for the historical reconstruction method, seem to acknowledge: while some individuals or groups of individuals have suggested bolder inflections for the field over the years...

... of the first to enunciate this conception, the question suggests itself of whether Smith drew any inspiration from the formulation of his predecessor. Several textual parallels between the two men, which seem- ingly have not yet been treated in an interrelated fashion, suggest that borrowing did...

... had to stop at our present stage of development, we would in any sense be better off or happier than if we had stopped a hundred or a thousand years ago is probably not answerable. The answer, however, does not matter. What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable...