E. Roy Weintraub - Böcker

In recent years, the focus of historians of economic thought has changed to also include the ideas and practices of contemporary economists. This has opened up new questions regarding the utilization of sources, choice of method, narrative styles, and ethical issues, as well as a new awareness of the historian’s place, role, and task. This book brings together leading contributors to provide, for the first time, a methodological overview of the historiography of economics. Emphasising the quality of the scholarship of recent decades, the book seeks to provide research tools for future historians of economic thought, as well as to any historians of social science with an interest in historiographic issues.

The responses to questions such as 'What is the explanation for changes in the unemployment rate?' frequently involve the presentation of a mathematical relationship, a function that relates one set of variables to another set of variables. It should become apparent that as one's understanding of functions, relationships, and variables becomes richer and more detailed, one's ability to provide explanations for economic phenomena becomes stronger and more sophisticated. The author believes that a student's intuition should be involved in the study of mathematical techniques in economics and that this intuition develops not so much from solving problems as from visualizing them. Thus the author avoids the definition-theorem-proof style in favor of a structure that encourages the student's geometric intuition of the mathematical results. The presentation of real numbers and functions emphasizes the notion of linearity. Consequently, linear algebra and matrix analysis are integrated into the presentation of the calculus of functions of several variables. The book concludes with a chapter on classical programming, and one on nonlinear and linear programming. This textbook will be of particular interest and value to graduate and senior undergraduate students of economics, because each major mathematical idea is related to an example of its use in economics.

This is the first full-length survey of current work which examines the compatibility of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Its particular distinction is that it makes accessible, to non-specialists, those extensive modern refinements of general equilibrium theory which are linked to macroeconomics and monetary theory. Part I traces the development and interlocking nature of two scientific research prgrams, macroeconomics and neo-Walrasian analysis. The five chapters in this part examine general equilibrium theory, Keynes' contribution, the 'neoclassical synthesis', and the Clower-Leijonhufvud contributions to questions of systemic coordination. The four chapters of Part II place recent work on the micro-foundations of macroeconomics within a taxonomic scheme of Walrasian equilibrium, Walrasian disequilibrium, Edgeworthian equilibrium, and Edgeworthian disequilibrium. Part III, a single chapter, provides an overview of the subject and ventures some conclusions.

Finding Equilibrium explores the post-World War II transformation of economics by constructing a history of the proof of its central dogma--that a competitive market economy may possess a set of equilibrium prices. The model economy for which the theorem could be proved was mapped out in 1954 by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu collaboratively, and by Lionel McKenzie separately, and would become widely known as the "Arrow-Debreu Model." While Arrow and Debreu would later go on to win separate Nobel prizes in economics, McKenzie would never receive it. Till Duppe and E. Roy Weintraub explore the lives and work of these economists and the issues of scientific credit against the extraordinary backdrop of overlapping research communities and an economics discipline that was shifting dramatically to mathematical modes of expression. Based on recently opened archives, Finding Equilibrium shows the complex interplay between each man's personal life and work, and examines compelling ideas about scientific credit, publication, regard for different research institutions, and the awarding of Nobel prizes.Instead of asking whether recognition was rightly or wrongly given, and who were the heroes or villains, the book considers attitudes toward intellectual credit and strategies to gain it vis-a-vis the communities that grant it. Telling the story behind the proof of the central theorem in economics, Finding Equilibrium sheds light on the changing nature of the scientific community and the critical connections between the personal and public rewards of scientific work.

In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics. Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics-both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge-have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations-tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.