Suchergebnisse

Empirical laws are rare in economics. This book describes efforts to anchor economic knowledge to invariant empirical laws. It links 17th and 18th century Galilean monetary economists to econophysics, a field that emerged in the mid-1990s. This virtual journey from past to present is charted by episodes on aggregates and empirical primacy. It includes the virtually unknown story of 19th century scholars who, by searching for a stricter mathematical approach, paved the way to an 'engineering' view of economics. Then there are celebrities like Pareto and his first empirical law governing the distribution of wealth. Pareto and Amoroso sparked a debate on the skewed distribution that spanned decades, ranging from finance to market transformations, to econophysics, with its concepts and tools inherited from statistical physics. The last stage of the journey goes through econophysics and the recent gradual advances it has made, which show how its position vis-à-vis economics has been changing.--

The integration of money into the Walrasian general equilibrium scheme is an age-old and intricate issue. One of the first attempts was made by Gustavo Del Vecchio, who, in the early twentieth century, built a theory of circulation that considered money as a medium of exchange, and investigated its organizational and social aspects in depth. Del Vecchio developed a theory of monetary service grounded on the distinction between individual and social utility of money. Moreover, he stated that money, credit, accumulation, and crisis could no longer be theorized with time omitted, and this induced him to formulate dynamic statements that put forward claims about money as a store of value. The organizational and social dimensions of money, time, and uncertainty were all important and interconnected aspects in Del Vecchio's scientific inquiry, for they all sprang from his conceptualization of money as a medium of exchange.

Between the two world wars, the theory of general economic equilibrium received notable impetus in Italy from the work of the Paretian School. This consisted of a small, but very active, group of economists, whose best-known members at the time were Luigi Amoroso and Giulio La Volpe. One of the main aspects of the research program carried out by the followers of Pareto was their attempt to dynamize the theory of general economic equilibrium. These economists believed that research on static economics was by then complete although they were well aware that some analytical problems were still unsolved, and they advanced the construction of dynamic models using new and sophisticated mathematical tools such as functional calculus. However, despite its originality, the Paretian approach to dynamics, at least in the fields of pure theorizing, did not have a significant impact on the understanding of economic dynamics in the postwar period; we attempt to explore why.