Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory

Olav Bjerkholt is Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo. Duo Qin is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary, University of London.

'[These] Yale lectures help us to understand how the connection between mathematical reasoning and economics evolved in the formative period between the two world wars. Furthermore, these lectures reveal the profound intellectual debt Samuelson owes to the Norwegian economist. This debt is apprant not only in the area of the origins of dynamic analysis, where the connection is direct, but also in the general concept of economics as an empirical science and not simply a hypothetical-deductive paradigm.' -Mario Pomini, University of Padua, History of Economic Thought and Policy/2-2012'The ingenuity visible in his view of traditional economic problems and the manifest creativity of his mind intrigue the contemporary reader today as they probably intrigued his audience in Paris eighty years ago.' - Ivan Moscati, University of Insubria

• I. General Consideration on Statistics and Dynamics in Economics, 1. What is economic theory?, 2. A discussion of the fundamental distinction between a static and a dynamic economic theory, 3. The static and the dynamic conception of an equilibrium, 4. Structural, confluent and fictitious relations in economic theory, II. Dynamic Formulation of Some Parts of Economic Theory, 5. A dynamic analysis of marginal utility, 6. A dynamic formulation of the law of demand, 7. A simple case of steered oscillations. The reaction problem, 8. A simple case of initiated oscillations, 9. Dynamic analysis of a closed economic system, III. Statistical Verification of the Laws of Dynamic Economic Theory, 10. Types of clustering in scatter diagrams and the non-significance of partial correlations, 11. General principles regarding the possibility of determining structural relations from empirical observations, 12. The separation of short-time and long-time components in an empirical time series, 13. The phase diagram. Phase elasticities and structural elasticities. The comparison problem in time series components, 14. Critical remarks on some of the recent attempts at statistical determination of demand and supply curves, 15. A new theory of linear regression. The diagonal and the arithmetic mean regression. The invariance problem, 16. A statistical analysis of selected groups of data by the methods developed in the present course