nep-hpe  New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
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Issue of 2019‒11‒25
five papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba)
 http://ep.repec.org/pth72

[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]

1. "Too Bad to Be True". Swedish Economists on Keynes's 'The Economic
    Consequences of the Peace, 1919-1929'
  Carlson, Benny; Jonung, Lars
3. Econophysics deserves a revamping
  Paolo Magrassi

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1. "Too Bad to Be True". Swedish Economists on Keynes's 'The Economic
    Consequences of the Peace, 1919-1929'
  Carlson, Benny (Department of Economic History, Lund University); Jonung,
   Lars (Department of Economics, Lund University)
 This paper examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David
 Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to
 John Maynard Keynes’s "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" and to the
 German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and
 Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes – “a bright
 spot in a time of darkness” – in a long review entitled "Too bad to be true".
 Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations impossible to
 meet unless German population growth was arrested. Germany should settle for
 a stationary population in exchange for reduced reparations. The contacts
 between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular
 between Cassel and Keynes, competing for being the best-known economist in
 the world in the 1920s. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil
 Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on
 the transfer problem. In his comment, Ohlin summarized two previously
 overlooked articles from 1928 where he analyzed the transfer of the German
 reparations by using his theory of international trade. The famous
 Keynes-Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer
 problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. He emerged as the champion
 in this debate, which marked the end of academic interest in the German
 reparations in the interwar period. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and
 Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the
 publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in
 the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of
 economics. We rely on newspaper and journal articles published by the Swedish
 economists, on half a dozen unpublished manuscripts by Wicksell as well as on
 the correspondence between Keynes and the Swedish economists.
  JEL: B13 E12 E44 F21 F35 F55 J11 N24 N44
  Keywords: John Maynard Keynes; David Davidson; Gustav Cassel; Eli
   Heckscher; Knut Wicksell; Bertil Ohlin; Treaty of Versailles; reparations;
   the transfer problem; United Kingdom; Germany; Sweden; Malthusianism; World
   War I.
  Date: 2019–11–18
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2019_016&r=hpe


3. Econophysics deserves a revamping
  Paolo Magrassi
 The paper argues that attracting more economists and adopting a more-precise
 definition of dynamic complexity might help econophysics acquire more
 attention in the economics community and bring new lymph to economic
 research. It may be necessary to concentrate less on the applications than on
 the basics of economic complexity, beginning with expansion and deepening of
 the study of small systems with few interacting components, while until thus
 far complexity has been assumed to be a prerogative of complicated systems
 only. It is possible that without a thorough analysis at that level, the
 understanding of systems that are at the same time complex and complicated
 will continue to elude economics and econophysics research altogether. To
 that purpose, the paper initiates and frames a definition of dynamic
 complexity grounded on the concept of non-linear dynamical system.
  Date: 2019–11
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1911.05814&r=hpe



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