Wilhelm Krelle (1916–2004) had two careers: one before 1945 as an officer in the German army (Wehrmacht), and a second after 1945 as an economist in West Germany. After retirement, he was honored as the economist who brought modern modeling techniques, Lawrence Klein’s macroeconometrics in particular, from the US to West Germany. After his engagement in the reform of East German economics, however, he was discredited as his early career became public. This essay reconstructs Krelle’s career in his attempt and struggle to maintain moral integrity in and between the various domains of his troubled life as officer, economist, political adviser, father, and husband.

This paper explores the history of the first economics film, made by Michael Polanyi. It traces the evolution of the film from the first idea to the latest version. It portrays Polanyi’s motives for making the film, the contexts in which the film was embedded, and its perception by various individuals and communities. The paper demonstrates the novelty of both the content and the presentation of Polanyi’s economic ideas through the eyes of his contemporaries. It discusses why it was important for Polanyi to make a film about the circulation of money and the principle of neutrality, and comments on what historiographers of economic thought might learn if they put a stronger emphasis on visual representations in their pursuits.

The evolution of Ferdinando Galiani’s thought toward social mathematic has been neglected by scholars, and his attempt to establish political arguments on the analytical basis remains unexplored. The non-systematic nature of Galiani’s intuitions, due to his laziness, largely justifies this underestimation of his scientific program. This paper intends to show that the mature abbé Galiani follows an intellectual itinerary autonomous and parallel to that followed by Marquis de Condorcet in the same years. The anti-Physiocratique querelle represents Galiani’s methodological maturation. In contrast with Physiocratic economic doctrine, based on the primacy of deductive methodology, Galiani claims for economic science the realism of circumstance against aprioristic axiomatic hypotheses and rationalist generalizations. Galiani’s project, substantially similar to Marquis de Condorcet’s approach to social science, can be defined as Newtonian social mathematics opposed to Physiocratic Cartesian social mathematics.

The aim of this paper is to focus, within Adam Smith’s system of thought, on the various aspects of the twofold link between the accumulation of capital and the demand for labor, on the one hand, and between an increasing population and increasing wages, on the other. This link is examined, first, in the light of the relationship between the principles of self-interest and competition; and, second, in support of the possibility that the long-run supply of labor may fall short of the long-run demand for it. The paper’s main argument is that this possibility is peacefully implemented in advancing economies by the “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,” which lies behind a continuous process of capital accumulation and technical progress along with the birth control techniques so widely used in our times.

Clarence Ayres was a strong dissenting voice in US economics during the twentieth century. In the 1930s, a debate between Ayres and Frank Knight was published by the International Journal of Ethics. Although the debate focused on ethics, the evolution of economics was also discussed. This paper proposes an understanding of Ayres’s ideas based on the context in which he made them. This context is defined by the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate and the archival correspondence between Ayres and Knight during the 1930s.

A century ago Arthur Pigou published The Economics of Welfare. Within this volume are a few lines relating to the pricing of traffic congestion. Over the years, these lines have attracted the attention and thoughts of some of the leading economists of their day. These have included Knight, Clapham, and Robertson in the 1920s; Kahn and Viner in the 1930s; Ellis and Fellner in the 1940s; and Buchanan, Vickrey, Solow, Friedman, Walters, Demsetz, Newbery, and Allais in the post-World War II period. Here, I look at the academic arguments from the 1920s concerning how roads should be priced and by whom. I then move to consider the continuation of the intellectual debates after World War II and their implications for policy design and implementation. Finally, I briefly look at the extent to which some of the existing road congestion pricing systems meet the requirements of the economic theory.