DENNIS ROBERTSON ON UTILITY AND WELFARE IN THE 1950s

The paper investigates Dennis Robertson's effort to defend the Cambridge utilitarian tradition against the so-called "new welfare economics" in the 1950s. Robertson's sustained and isolated endeavor to rescue Marshallian cardinal utility attracted the attention of economists at the time. According to Robertson, welfare economics should be based on cardinal utility, and the ordinalist revolution in the consumer and welfare theories should be rejected. It was only by sticking to the study of the economic or material aspects of welfare under the assumption of measurable utility that the economist would regain its ability to approach economic welfare as an objective of economic policy.

Furtado, North and the New Economic History

Some parallels are drawn between Celso Furtado’s structural and Douglass North’s neo-institutional approaches to economic history. It is argued that both authors interpreted the economic history of Brazil and the United States respectively in the context of the investigation of the economic growth process, under the influence of the staples approach to trade and growth. Against some commentators, it is shown that Furtado did pay attention to quantitative evidence. The role of colonial rules is also highlighted in the search for an explanation of the divergent long-run performances of the Brazilian and North-American economies.Celso Furtado, Douglass North, New Economic History, Structuralism, Institutions

Some Cambridge reactions to The General Theory: David Champernowne and Joan Robinson on full employment

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DISEQUILIBRIUM MACROECONOMICS: AN EPISODE IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF MODERN MACROECONOMICS

The paper investigates the rise and fall of the disequilibrium approach in macroeconomics between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s. During that period macroeconomists became attracted to the interpretation of unemployment phenomena based on the notion that markets are not in equilibrium. It was believed that such an approach could result in supply and demand functions distinct from those of conventional theory. However, by the late 1980s disequilibrium macroeconomics had largely disappeared from view, while approaches influenced by New Classical Macroeconomics and New Keynesian Economics became dominant. The present paper examines the contributions of the main authors - Patinkin, Clower, Leijonhufvud, Barro, Grossman, Solow, Stiglitz and Malinvaud - in order to offer a new pwerspective on the reasons for its sudden disappearance.