Re: Knut Wicksell and his cumulative process analysis. It occurs to me  
that what economists call the "Wicksellian cumulative process" is a  
perfect example of the operation of Stigler's Law of Eponymy according  
to which "No scientific discovery is named for its original discoverer."

For as James Ahiakpor and others have shown in these posts, 18th and  
19th century classical economists including Hume, Smith, Thornton,  
Ricardo, Joplin, and others had assembled and put together elements of  
the cumulative process model long before Wicksell did so in his 1898  
Interest and Prices. Those classicals were the original discoverers of  
the cumulative process analysis. Yet today we refer to the model as  
the Wicksellian cumulative process rather than as the Hume-Thornton- 
Ricardo-Joplin cumulative process.

Why? Because it was Wicksell more than his classical predecessors who  
made the model sing and who put it on the map. It was Wicksell's  
formulation that was most instrumental in influencing economists to  
accept the model as a valid depiction of the process of price-level  
change. For that reason, Wicksell gets the honor of having the model  
bear his name. Stigler's Law.

The same thing happened with the ordinary microeconomic demand-and- 
supply curve diagram, which today bears the label "the Marshallian  
Cross" after Alfred Marshall. But it wasn't Marshall who discovered  
the diagram. Rather A. A. Cournot was its original discoverer in his  
1838 Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of  
Wealth. And after Cournot but before Marshall, at least four  
economists including Karl Rau, Jules Dupuit, Hans von Mangoldt, and  
Fleeming Jenkin presented the diagram, often in quite elaborate and  
sophisticated forms. Yet today we honor Marshall, not his forerunners,  
by naming the diagram after him.

Why? Because it was Marshall who in his 1890 Principles of Economics  
made the diagram sing and who put it on the map. It was his version  
that caught the attention of the entire economics profession.  
Stigler's Law again.