The article focuses on François Perroux’s work at the second half of the 1940s, at the moment when he redefines his third-way ideas in terms of a liberal interventionist perspective. The point of ...departure is an interpretation of Perroux’s intellectual trajectory during the interwar period, as a way of understanding how his investigations in the field of national income and planning finally became an essential part of his third-way perspectives, previously formulated in corporatist terms but partially reshaped in the immediate postwar period. Particular attention is paid to the institutional work led by him on national accounts in the first years of the Institut de Science Économique Appliquée. Refusing to analyze Perroux’s contribution in terms of eclecticism, the article attempts to critically illuminate complementarities and continuities in the author’s analytical framework between the interwar and postwar periods.
Rescuing Henry George Mueller, Thomas Michael
History of political economy,
10/2021, Letnik:
53, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Harold Hotelling's work, from natural resources economics to optimal taxation, and from spatial to welfare economics, was deeply influenced by his Georgist affiliation and by a Georgist game that we ...now call Monopoly, which at the time was known as the Landlord's Game. We explore this influence, its history, and the role it played in Hotelling's work and ideas. We show that political beliefs deeply shaped Hotelling's approach to economics and that the rules of the Landlord's Game helped him think about economic mechanisms.
As part of a book symposium on Erwin Dekker's Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021), Thomas Kayzel reflects on Tinbergen being the 'ideal Weberian scientist' while also ...combining politics with science.
John R. Commons is one of the founders of the American institutional school. In recent years, two compiled manuscripts of his main book, Institutional Economics, were discovered in Japan and in the ...United States. One is a manuscript written in 1927 found at the Kyoto Prefectural Library, and the other is a manuscript dated 1928-29 found at The United States Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library. Using these manuscripts, this article examines formation process of Commons' institutional theory of interest. In particular, the influence of R. G. Hawtrey on Commons' theory is explained. Commons depended heavily on Hawtrey's theory in order to overcome some limitations included in Wicksell's theory, in the section of Institutional Economics titled "A World Pay Community." This is clarified mainly by comparing it with a section of the manuscript with the same title, which did not refer to Hawtrey.
I illustrate the formative process of John R. Commons' price movement theory. To characterize his theoretical development, I propose a framework, "income approach," in which the change in collective ...expectation leads to a change in the amount of income, first as bank credit and then as price movement. Further, I illustrate his theoretical development as the framework's formation. Compared with his 1890s papers, his 1923 papers show significant theoretical progress. His reading of Ralph G. Hawtrey, the pioneer of the income approach, may have contributed to this progress. Subsequently, by elaborating on an explanation for the continuously falling prices during the Great Depression, Commons finally established his comprehensive income approachs.
The perspective of a legal political economy was a main feature of J. R. Commons' Institutional Economics. He interpreted the development of a capitalist economy as the evolution of legal ...institutions. The most important legal institutions supporting a capitalist economy are property rights. The definition of property has been enlarged from corporeal property to include incorporeal property and intangible property. Commons contrasts the law of incorporeal property with that of intangible property. He argues two quite opposite economic relationships: one is the creditor-debtor relationship and the other is the seller-buyer relationship. This study argues Commons' financial business cycle theory using these two opposite concepts of property.
In Institutional Economics (1934), John R. Commons argued that insufficient profits and expectations based on the "profit-margin" theory, not the "profit-share" theory, were the primary causes of ...economic depressions. He also posited a business cycle theory to analyze historical global depressions and explained a pricing theory within the context of capitalism's historical development. Based on this discourse, Commons evaluated the economic actor that would receive the benefits of increased efficiency under different circumstances and determined that lowering the price from the buyer-consumer's standpoint deprived producers of gains, while raising the price from the producer-seller's standpoint deprived consumers of benefits. Thus, Commons concluded that prices should be stabilized, since they affect expected profits on which future production will be based, and the effects of supply and demand should be controlled using state power for a period of time to protect intangible properties. This makes macro-economic policy an important tool in stabilizing the business cycle. According to Commons, we should safeguard public interest by stabilizing prices through macro monetary policy and protection of efficient producers' profits.
John R. Commons sought to orient the U.S. economy in the direction of reasonable value as a way to "save capitalism by making it good." In particular, he offered two paths to that "middle way" ...between the socio-political extremes of fascism and communism: judicial sovereignty and collective democracy. This policy note considers a variety of present-day challenges to pursuit of those paths; some possible ways forward are also suggested.
John Servos explains the emergence of physical chemistry in America by presenting a series of lively portraits of such pivotal figures as Wilhelm Ostwald, A. A. Noyes, G. N. Lewis, and Linus Pauling, ...and of key institutions, including MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Caltech. In the early twentieth century, physical chemistry was a new hybrid science, the molecular biology of its time. The names of its progenitors were familiar to everyone who was scientifically literate; studies of aqueous solutions and of chemical thermodynamics had transformed scientific knowledge of chemical affinity. By exploring the relationship of the discipline to industry and to other sciences, and by tracing the research of its leading American practitioners, Servos shows how physical chemistry was eclipsed by its own offspring--specialties like quantum chemistry.
