Born in Cambridge, England, to an upper-middle-class family, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) attended Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in mathematics in 1904. From an early age, he evinced an optimism about improving human life and believed in the power of government to change things for the better. During World War I, Keynes served in the Treasury and his success in this role led to his appointment as a representative to the Versailles pe...

Born in Cambridge, England, to an upper-middle-class family, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) attended Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in mathematics in 1904. From an early age, he evinced an optimism about improving human life and believed in the power of government to change things for the better. During World War I, Keynes served in the Treasury and his success in this role led to his appointment as a representative to the Versailles pe...

The classic history of economic thought through the ages—now fully updated and expandedHesiod defined the basic economic problem as one of scarce resources, a view still held by economists today. Diocletian tried to save the Roman Empire with wage and price fixes—a strategy that has not gone entirely out of style. Roger Backhouse takes readers from the ancient world to the frontiers of game theory, mechanism design, and engagements with climate science, presenting ...

Interpreting Macroeconomics explores a variety of different approaches to macroeconomic thought. The book considers a number of historiographical and methodological positions, as well as analyzing various important episodes in the development of macroeconomics, before during and after the Keynesian revolution. Roger Backhouse shows that the full richness of these developments can only by brought out by approaches which blend both relativism and absolutism, and historical and ratio...

Paul A. Samuelson is widely regarded as the world's leading economist in the so-called “Age of Keynes”, the three decades after WWII, acknowledged by his being the first American to win the Nobel prize in economics. Foundations of Economic Analysis was a manual on how economic theory should be done, and the nineteen editions of Economics: An Introductory Analysis provided the first exposure to economics for millions of students worldwide. Volume I of this intellectual bio...

Paul Samuelson was at the heart of a revolution in economics. He was "the foremost academic economist of the 20th century," according to the New York Times, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His work transformed the field of economics and helped give it the theoretical and mathematic rigor that increased its influence in business and policy making. In Founder of Modern Economics, Roger E. Backhouse explores the central importance of Samuelson's p...

This is the third and final volume of collected papers of A.W. Bob Coats. Coats began to collect material for this volume in the years following the publication of the second volume in 1993, but sadly died in 2007, before the work was completed.The volume has now been completed under the editorship of Roger Backhouse and Bruce Caldwell. Along with his articles, the compilation of the volume also reflects Coats’ interest in and commitment to book reviews, a selection of which have b...

Roger Backhouse is a key figure in the field of economic methodology. Explorations in Economic Methodology both clarifies and responds to the issues raised by the literature and argues that methodology is an essential activity. Offering a constructive, but critical, response to the recent literature, this collection provides important new insights for students and researchers in economic methodology and the philosophy of science.

This book tells the story of the search for disequilibrium micro-foundations for macroeconomic theory, from the disequilibrium theories of Patinkin, Clower and Leijonhufvud to recent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with imperfect competition. Placing this search against the background of wider developments in macroeconomics, the authors contend that this was never a single research program, but involved economists with very different aims who developed the basic ideas about q...

Does economics hold the key to everything or does the recent financial crisis show that it has failed? This book provides an assessment of modern economics that cuts through the confusion and controversy on this question. Case studies of the creation of new markets, the Russian transition to capitalism, globalization, and money and finance establish that economics has been very successful where problems have been well defined and where the world can be changed to fit the theory, but that i...

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. A final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a who...

The welfare state has, over the past forty years, come under increasing attack from liberals who consider comprehensive welfare provision inimical to liberalism. Yet, many of the architects of the post-World War II welfare states were liberals, many of whom were economists as much as socialists. Liberalism and the Welfare State investigates the thinking of liberal economists about welfare, focusing on Britain, Germany and Japan, each of which had a different tradition of economic ...