David Hume and Adam Smith were friends, but their friendship does not imply that the two authors shared the same ideas, or should have shared the same ideas. Money is an example of a subject of disagreement between David Hume and Adam Smith that has either been ignored or interpreted as a puzzle, given their friendship. I suggest that Smith did not replicate or cite Hume’s exposition of the quantity of money in his Wealth of Nations because Smith thought Hume was wrong. For Smith, Hume fell into the mercantilist fallacy of considering the accumulation of money as wealth. Rather than accumulating money through market restrictions, as other mercantilists would, Hume advocated the accumulation of money through commerce and hoarding, but Hume’s goal was still the accumulation of gold and silver. Smith saw through Hume’s mistakes and addressed each of them, thus rejecting Hume’s theory of money, while maintaining their friendship.

Abolition of slavery in British colonies led to the facilitation of Indian indentured migration by the British government. This form of migration came about when the discourse of economic freedom and individual liberty strongly resonated in British political economy circles, following the work of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. We analyze how unfreedom in indentured labor was rationalized when the rhetoric of freedom was essential to the dominant intellectual milieu. We consider why free labor was deemed unfeasible in the plantation colonies. We also consider the constraints that asymmetric information and unequal bargaining posed to freedom within the institution of indenture. We conclude that indenture represented an uneasy compromise between the problems of slavery and the unattainable goal of free labor.

Standard models of the price specie flow do not consider credit. Yet Hume and preceding authors were reacting to the implosion of Law’s financial bubble. We delineate the anti-credit thesis contained within the evolution of eighteenth-century balance of payments analyses. A string of eighteenth-century authors argued over whether the balance of payments constituted a binding constraint on credit creation. As part of their analysis they considered how changes in the money supply might alter output, prices, employment, capital, and population. How new money entered the economy was often critical. We start with Law and then consider Melon, Gervaise, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Montesquieu, Hume, Steuart, Forbonnais, and Smith. In closing we pay particular attention to the idea that Hume and Smith effectively displaced preceding, often “mercantilist,” analyses of credit and the balance of payments.

Recent studies have revalued Hazel Kyrk for her original works on consumption and the critique of neoclassical demand theory. Kyrk’s A Theory of Consumption (1923) opened up new perspectives for understanding the nature of consumption and revalued home economics as a central part of the economist agenda, taking distance from the first generation of home economists. This paper focuses on Kyrk’s post-1923 scientific production and professional activities. Our main purpose is to show her contributions to the quantitative foundations of consumption together with her attempt to feed contemporary research on consumers’ behavior with pragmatism, policy advice, and field knowledge. We selected specific issues: the education of consumers through information and a strategy of “critical consumption”; the analysis of strategic industries; the well-being of American families; and the importance of “invisible” objects (non-market activities) and their statistical processing.

Classical political economists developed several different explanations for what they saw as an inherent tendency for the rate of profit to decline over time. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, some British advocates of colonization developed a corollary to those theories, suggesting that exporting capital to colonies could help arrest and reverse the decline. That argument was championed by the English political economist and promoter of colonization projects Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and it was systematized by John Stuart Mill. Ironically, the view that capital export and colonization played crucial roles in sustaining the rate of profit in advanced economies was later adopted by some Marxist theorists. Parallels between Karl Marx and J. S. Mill may help explain the remarkable theoretical continuity on this topic between nineteenth-century British advocates of colonization and early twentieth-century Marxist critics of colonialism.

Carl Snyder was one of the most prominent US monetary economists of the 1920s and 1930s. His pioneering work on constructing the empirical counterparts of the terms in the equation of exchange led him to formulate a 4% monetary growth rule. Snyder is especially apposite because he was on the staff of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Why, despite his pioneering empirical work and his position as an insider, did Snyder fail to effectively challenge the dominant real bills views of the Federal Reserve (Fed)? A short answer is that he did not possess a convincing version of the quantity theory that attributed the Great Depression to a contraction in the money stock produced by the Fed, as opposed to the dominant real bills view attributing it to the collapse of speculative excess.

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university’s first 100 years, 1892 to 1992. Many people associate Chicago’s views with Milton Friedman’s advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was much more than that, including the work of J. Laurence Laughlin on bimetallism, Jacob Viner on the balance of payments, Lloyd Metzler on transfers, Harry Johnson on trade and currencies, Lloyd Mints on exchange rate regimes, Robert Mundell on optimal currency areas, and Arnold Harberger on shadow exchange rates, among others. The analysis shows that, although different scholars emphasized different issues, there was a common thread in this research, anchored on the role of relative prices’ changes during the adjustment process.

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings’s views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.

Ludwig von Mises’s methodological apriorism is often attributed to the broader Austrian School of economics. However, there is considerable controversy concerning the meaning of Mises’s justification of his apriorism. There are inconsistencies within and across Mises’s methodological writings that engender confusion in the secondary literature. This confusion is aggravated by the fact that his apriorism cannot be interpreted as an artifact of his historical milieu. The two prevailing families of interpretation both treat Mises’s apriorism as anachronistic, albeit in divergent senses. I conclude that the primary and secondary literatures on Mises’s apriorism indicate its inconsistency and incoherence. We have no idea what justification Mises intended when he asserted the a priori nature of the fundamental propositions of economics. If this is right, then, whatever method(s) they follow, Austrian economists cannot (deliberately) follow Mises’s apriorism, because no one knows well enough how Mises meant to justify it to follow it purposefully.

The literature on John Maynard Keynes’s activity as an investor has substantially grown in the last decade (e.g., Chambers and Dimson 2013; Accominotti and Chambers 2016; Chambers and Kabiri 2016; Cristiano, Marcuzzo, and Sanfilippo 2018; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2018; Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016, [2020] 2022). The contribution of the present paper is to investigate a specific feature of Keynes’s investment activity on his own account: his preference for American rather than British Investment Trusts. While this feature has also been observed in his investments on behalf of King’s College (Chambers and Kabiri 2016), we focus here on his personal portfolio, and we also provide a set of possible explanations for his preference. We maintain that some reasons have to do with the different structure and characteristics of the Investment Trusts in the two countries. Others relate more closely to the kind of investment policy typically adopted by the American Investment Trusts, which was much more in line with Keynes’s own approach to investment—especially regarding the stocks selection. We also attribute a role to his epistemological approach, i.e., the view that, although a full and perfect knowledge is not reachable by individuals due to the radical uncertainty characterizing the environment (“we simply don’t know,” Keynes 1937) and to the limitations of the human mind, reliable information remains, however, a guide for rational decision making, also in financial markets. Following this approach, as we will show, Keynes preferred to delegate his investment choices in the US stock market to those professionals—the managers of the Investment Trusts—who possessed, in his opinion, the wider set of reliable information on that market, while keeping for himself the investment choices in the UK stock market.