Profiles

The law of one price is one of the most basic laws of economics and yet it is a law observed in the breach. That a given commodity can have only one price, except for the briefest of disequilibrium transitions

I n 1998 I presented a paper which argued that no theory of money was possible—in the sense of there being a stable relationship between a few explanatory variables.

In reviewing the contributions of Adam Smith to the growth of economics Hans Brems writes that "[m]uch of what Smith had to say had been said before—but in French. Academic etiquette of his day demanded no acknowledgements, and he offered none." This is an unusually clear statement of a point of...

In describing Adam Smith's acknowledgments as "neo-plagiarism" (Rashid, 1990), was trying to characterize a situation where a scholar either borrows ideas from others but provides no acknowledgment, or had access to fruitful and important ideas yet seems to have ignored them. Volume 10, Number 2 (...

It is now generally accepted by historians of economic thought that in the nineteenth century Adam Smith's work was much overpraised for its originality and design. In an obvious reference to Smith, both Archbishop Whately and John Stuart Mill spoke of political economy having arisen as a science...