Project MUSE®: History of Political Economy - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in History of Political Economy.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 31, no. 3 (1999);
Vol. 32 (2000) - Vol. 36 (2004)Latest Articles: History of Political EconomyTWOProject MUSE®History of Political Economy1527-19190018-2702Latest articles in History of Political Economy. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Form and Function of Price Indexes: A Historical Accounting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178087
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Greenlees 2001 documents the evolving objective of the CPI over time.See, e.g., the theoretical contributions by Pollak (1989) and Diewert and Nakamura (1993). A particularly active line of research is in the area on new goods and quality change (Bresnahan and Gordon 1997; Cutler et al. 1998; Hausman 1999; Nevo 2003; Pakes 2003; Trajtenberg 1990; Triplett 1999). Banzhaf (2004) and Nordhaus (1999) have extended the cost-of-living framework to include nonmarket goods and services.See also Deaton 1998 and Turvey 2001.For example, Schultze and Mackie (2002) and Turvey (2001) highlight the instability of preferences, including Kahneman-Knetsch endowment effects and the shifting of fashions over time. Deaton (1998) is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallThe Form and Function of Price Indexes: A Historical Accounting2005-02-10text/htmlen-USThe Form and Function of Price Indexes: A Historical Accounting2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®719922026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10The Economic Institutions of Higher Education (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178088
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In Economic Institutions of Higher Education, J. Patrick Raines and Charles G. Leathers survey the contributions of a number of key writers, from the eighteenth century onward, on the behaviors and operations of universities. Undoubtedly, this is an important area of inquiry for economists: higher education is now big business across the globe, and a historical analysis greatly helps in explaining how this growth has come to pass.
Raines and Leathers begin with a historical overview of universities (chap. 2), from the medieval colleges that trained students for religious orders, through the Enlightenment, to the behemoths that are modern universities. They then shift to analyses of writings on the functions and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallThe Economic Institutions of Higher Education (review)2005-02-10text/htmlen-USThe Economic Institutions of Higher Education (review)2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®85512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Vilfredo Pareto and the Birth of Modern Microeconomics (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178089
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This is an important book. The reader is provided for the first time in the English language with a full-blown discussion of the progressive development of Pareto's theory of choice, by way of a careful analysis of his sophisticated methodology and epistemology. Delving into a vast secondary literature (mainly in Italian and French) and into Pareto's own (and little read) enormous oeuvres (exclusively in Italian and French), the author offers a thorough and welcome revision of the Whiggish textbook version of Pareto's turn-of-the-century evolution from an economist who described a psychophysical cardinalist marginal utility to an economist who emphasized ordinalist indexes of preferences illustrated by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallVilfredo Pareto and the Birth of Modern Microeconomics (review)2005-02-10text/htmlen-USVilfredo Pareto and the Birth of Modern Microeconomics (review)2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®130092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10"History of Economics for the Nonhistorian": A Collection of Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178090
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Several years ago the editors of this journal, encouraged by Blackwell's publishers, set out to put together a handbook of economic thought directed not to the usual and rather small audience of other historians but to the economics profession at large. The inspiration for the chapters would come not from the subdiscipline of the history of economic thought but from the various subdisciplines of economics. We asked what questions puzzled economists today and how might they be enlightened through a historical perspective. We invited historians of economics worldwide to make proposals and to prepare papers. We envisaged contributions that would relate to current controversies in theory, applied economics
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmall"History of Economics for the Nonhistorian": A Collection of Papers2005-02-10text/htmlen-US"History of Economics for the Nonhistorian": A Collection of Papers2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®32882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Money, Time, and Rationality in Max Weber: Austrian Connections (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178091
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This book endeavors to persuade us that the work of Max Weber provides some substantive economic and methodological lessons for economists. To date there is no consensus on the subject of Weber's relationship to economics. In Stephen Parsons's account, however, Weber was not only a renowned economic sociologist, but he had intellectual links to Austrian economics, particularly to the first-generation Austrian school and its unique "marginal" analysis—as distinct from the marginalist economics of the Walrasians and Marshallians. Weber later used these early Austrian links to develop a critique of economic planning along Austrian (though not von Misesian) lines.
The first key issue for Parsons is to reconcile
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallMoney, Time, and Rationality in Max Weber: Austrian Connections (review)2005-02-10text/htmlen-USMoney, Time, and Rationality in Max Weber: Austrian Connections (review)2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®90942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Contested Histories of an Applied Field: The Case of Health Economics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178092
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Petty valued an Englishman at 69 pounds and a Frenchman at 60 pounds. He allowed that the latter may be an underestimate because he could buy an Algerian slave for 60 pounds. This latter statement is what health economists refer to as "sensitivity analysis."Arrow (1970) showed that there was no general rule that could rank social states—based only on the way these states are ranked by individuals—that would also satisfy four reasonable assumptions: (1) the Pareto rule (if everyone prefers x to y, x is preferred to y); (2) the independence of irrelevant alternatives; (3) the rule holds for all logically possible sets; and (4) there is no dictator. Sen (1977) showed that a similar result holds even if the individual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallContested Histories of an Applied Field: The Case of Health Economics2005-02-10text/htmlen-USContested Histories of an Applied Field: The Case of Health Economics2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®497272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Nash Equilibrium
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178093
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See Aumann 1987, 43; and van Damme and Weibull 1995, 15.See the best-selling biography by Sylvia Nasar (1998).The true landmark was Kreps 1990a.For recent, and not-so-recent, general assessments of this issue see, e.g., Johansen 1982; Aumann 1987; Kreps 1987, 1990b; Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green 1995, 248-49; Jacobsen 1996; Mailath 1998; and Hargreaves Heap and Varoufakis 2004, chaps. 2-3.All the papers have been republished in Nash 1996.A photostatic reproduction of Nash's dissertation is in Kuhn and Nasar 2002.For general appraisals of Nash's contribution, see Leonard 1994 and Milnor 1998. See also the technical assessments by van Damme and Weibull (1995) and Binmore (1996).It is remarkable that the word
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallNash Equilibrium2005-02-10text/htmlen-USNash Equilibrium2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®470532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10What Can We Learn for Today from 300-Year-Old Writings about Stock Markets?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178094
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Other potential arguments for the benefits of examining the history of economic thought are easy to make, although less likely to be accepted as relevant to the current practitioner, but anyway are not the province of this article.Despite the fact that economic historians themselves have worried about their relevance to "modern" economics (see, for example, Arrow 1985 and Solow 19
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallWhat Can We Learn for Today from 300-Year-Old Writings about Stock Markets?2005-02-10text/htmlen-USWhat Can We Learn for Today from 300-Year-Old Writings about Stock Markets?2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®405052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Swinging All the Way: The Education of Doctor Lucas and Foes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178095
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Samuelson's 1947 doctoral thesis, "The Foundations of Economic Analysis," highly valued the contribution of the 1933 paper by Frisch to the redefinition of the landscape of economics. His views were largely shared at the time. Although by that time exclusively concerned with the deterministic part of the Frischian paradigm, Samuelson's specific contribution emphasized two very important concepts. One was the notion of determination: as the propagation system was represented by a system of simultaneous equations, no variable could be said to distinctively influence the others, given that all were simultaneously determined, since the equilibrium conditions were set and the equilibrium state was stable and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallSwinging All the Way: The Education of Doctor Lucas and Foes2005-02-10text/htmlen-USSwinging All the Way: The Education of Doctor Lucas and Foes2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®742872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10The Philosophy of Keynes's Economics: Probability, Uncertainty, and Convention (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178096
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It may still be early for an overall assessment of the long-term achievements of the recent literature on Keynes's philosophical work—literature that not only analyzes Keynes's work but sometimes credits him with being a leading figure of twentieth-century philosophy. Yet time seems ripe for a survey of the different interpretations, whose authors are now given "the opportunity to present reasonably brief and accessible statements of their positions" (15). After the editors' introduction, contributions are grouped under six headings: "probability, uncertainty, and choice" (five essays); "continuity" (five); "social ontology" (three); "convention" (two); "methodology" (two); and "looking ahead" (two). These
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallThe Philosophy of Keynes's Economics: Probability, Uncertainty, and Convention (review)2005-02-10text/htmlen-USThe Philosophy of Keynes's Economics: Probability, Uncertainty, and Convention (review)2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®79232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Reflection without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178097
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This is a book that cannot be done justice to in the limited space I have been allotted. Unfortunately I am merely able to recount here what the book offers and to note what I consider to be a chief deficiency.
The volume was written for a select group—economists interested in economic methodology and relevant developments in the philosophy of science. According to
the author, the purpose of the work is threefold: to survey modern developments in economic methodology, to survey the contemporary philosophy of science (which Hands prefers to call "science theory") as it relates to economics, and to compel the reader to accept the "new economic methodology" as opposed to the traditional approach to economic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallReflection without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory (review)2005-02-10text/htmlen-USReflection without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory (review)2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®98062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10Behavioral Economics: How Psychology Made Its (Limited) Way Back into Economics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178098
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As noted earlier, a bird's-eye perspective allows such generalized observations. At the same time, the contributions of, for instance, John Maynard Keynes, Alfred Marshall, and others were full of psychological allusions. See Lewin 1996 for further details.Since we are merely setting the stage for the rise of "old" behavioral economics here, we refer the reader to the following for detailed discussions of these connections: Lewin 1996, Rutherford 1994, and Yonay 1998.With the same caveat as in the previous note, the reader is referred to Blaug 1992, Caldwell 1994, Hutchison 1938, and Robbins 1984 for details on the disagreements between Robbins and Hutchison.It should perhaps also come as no surprise that Friedman
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/75/image/coversmallBehavioral Economics: How Psychology Made Its (Limited) Way Back into Economics2005-02-10text/htmlen-USBehavioral Economics: How Psychology Made Its (Limited) Way Back into Economics2005-02-102005TWOProject MUSE®1052212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002005-02-10