Robert Lucas was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in economics “for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy.” More than any other person in the period from 1970 to 2000, Robert Lucas revolutionized macroeconomic theory. His work led directly […]| Econlib
The Austrian school of economics was founded in 1871 with the publication of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics. menger, along with william stanley jevons and leon walras, developed the marginalist revolution in economic analysis. Menger dedicated Principles of Economics to his German colleague William Roscher, the leading figure in the German historical school, which dominated economic […]| Econlib
Measuring prices and their rate of change accurately is central to almost every economic issue, from the conduct of monetary policy to measuring economic progress (see economic growth) over time and across countries to the cost and structure of indexed government spending programs and taxes. Most of us are familiar with the prices of many […]| Econlib
Alfred Marshall was the dominant figure in British economics (itself dominant in world economics) from about 1890 until his death in 1924. His specialty was microeconomics—the study of individual markets and industries, as opposed to the study of the whole economy. In his most important book, Principles of Economics, Marshall emphasized that the price […]| Econlib
More than any other economist, Paul Samuelson raised the level of mathematical analysis in the profession. Until the late 1930s, when Samuelson started his stunning and steady stream of articles, economics was typically understood in terms of verbal explanations and diagrammatic models. Samuelson wrote his first published article, “A Note on the Measurement of […]| Econlib
The Internet and Economics “The Internet changes everything”—or so we were told at the height of the Internet craze. According to a prominent Wall Street Journal article titled “Goodbye Supply and Demand,” one of the changes it was claimed to have brought about was a transformation of the basic economic forces at work in the […]| Econlib
George Stigler was the quintessential empirical economist. Paging through his classic microeconomics text The Theory of Price, one is struck by how many principles of economics are illustrated with real data rather than hypothetical examples. Stigler deserves a great deal of the credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence. Stigler’s two longest-held […]| Econlib