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This book focuses on the interaction between practising economists and previous generations of economists. Because economic problems, such as crashes, tend to recur and are only partially understood, it may be profitable read the work of previous generations in a collaborative spirit. Sometimes this can offer a different perspective on current preoccupations and cause us to reconsider the scope of our much criticised subject. The book gathers together earlier work by the author which appeared in various academic books and journals with theaddition of six new chapters.The collection

Alfred Russel Wallace is famous as the co-discoverer with Darwin of the mechanism of natural selection. He was also an enthusiastic economic and social reformer. This article considers the relationship of Wallace's work to that of a number of eminent economists, including Malthus, Mill, Marshall, and Fisher. Wallace's economics, which attempted to analyze practical socialism, protection of the environment, and monetary stability, was interesting and insightful. It was only loosely related to his evolutionary theory.

Jeremy Bentham provided a comprehensive list of the sources of pleasure and pain, rather in the manner of modern researchers into human well-being. He explicitly used the term well-being and made both qualitative and quantitative proposals for its measurement. Bentham insisted that the measurement of well-being should be firmly based on the concerns and subjective valuations of those directly concerned, in the context of a liberal society. Those who wished to superimpose other judgements were dismissed as "ipsedixitists." He also addressed, though of course could not solve, some of the measurement problems more recently tackled by "neo-Benthamites." The paper concludes that many of Bentham's observations about the measurement of well-being are still relevant to issues in current research.

This paper builds on the notion of a bargain or contract across the generations. It argues that the idea of a generational bargain is helpful when thinking about a range of problems in economic and social policy, from pension reform to the extended family. The standard bargain (usually implicit) is that the working generation makes transfers of human capital to the young and consumption to the old on the understanding that other generations will behave in a similar way. Thus there are at least three generations involved in the process. The paper examines the roles of altruism and of self‐interest in generational transfers and the stability of the bargain against "bad" behaviour by particular generations and against fractures in the generational cluster.