Economics Broadly Considered

Jeff E. Biddle is Professor of Economics at Michigan State University. His research in labor economics and the history of economic thought has been published in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, and History of Political Economy. He serves as co-editor of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, and his current research concerns the development of the economics profession in the United States during the twentieth century. John B. Davis is Professor of Economics, Marquette University and editor of the Review of Social Economy and the Routledge series, “Advances in Social Economics.” Steven G. Medema is Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado at Denver. His research interests include law and economics, public economics, and the economic role of government in the history of economic thought. He serves as editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

• Introduction: Economics broadly considered: a glance at Warren J. Samuels’ contributions to economics PART I The history of economic thought 1 The training of the economist in antiquity: the “mirror for princes” tradition in Alcibiades Major and Aquinas’ On Kingship 2 A quintessential (ahistorical) Tableau Économique: to sum up Pre-and Post-Smith classical paradigms 3 Frank Knight as institutional economist 4 From divergence to convergence: Irving Fisher and John R. Commons as champions of monetary reforms 5 E.H. Chamberlin: oligopoly and oligopolistic interdependence: the issue of space 6 Two phases of Kuznets’s interest in Schumpeter 7 The AEA and the radical challenge to American social Science PART II Aspects of economic method 8 On the credentials of methodological pluralism 9 Some practical aspects of pluralism in economics 10 What econometrics can and cannot tell us about historical actors: brewing, betting and rationality in London, 1822–44 PART III The legal-economic nexus 11 Putting the “political” back into political economy 12 Output categories for a comparative institutional approach to law and economics 13 On the changing nature of the public utility concept: a retrospective and prospective assessment PART IV Aspects of institutional and Post Keynesian economics 14 The institutional economics of Nobel Prize winners 15 J. Fagg Foster’s theory of instrumental value 16 Monetary policy in the twenty-first century in the light of the debate between Chartalism and Monetarism 17 1935 where we were—where we are 2000