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In a note appearing in the August 2024 issue of History of Political Economy (HOPE), Edward Nelson argues that a passage commenting on James Forder's Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth (2014) in a 2023 HOPE article by Carlo Cristiano titled "The Early Reception of the Phillips Curve in the United Kingdom" would provide a false characterization of the economic literature and claims priority in affirming that UK policymakers did not use the Phillips curve as a menu for policy. It is shown in this reply that Nelson's reading of Cristiano's 2023 article, and more specifically of the passage commenting on Forder's 2014 book, is based on a misunderstanding. The purpose of the 2023 article was not to show that UK policymakers did not use the Phillips trade-off as a menu for policy. In that article, consensus on this point is taken for granted. It is also argued in this reply that there is no need to mention Nelson's works to affirm that UK policymakers did not use the Phillips trade-off as a policy menu and that Nelson's works are indeed very relevant, but for other reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Maynard Keynes is frequently mentioned in Money and Empire, where he stands out for his book on the Indian gold exchange standard and his highly informative and perceptive account of the crisis of 1914. Based on de Cecco's book, one may be induced to think that, before WWI, Keynes was an economist deeply involved in the public life of his country and the administration of the Empire. However, this contrasts with the young economist's image that has crystallised in the literature on Keynes. In the attempt to solve this contradiction, it is possible to show that the conventional image of the young Keynes is far from satisfactory. Moreover, even though Money and Empire is not altogether reliable in presenting Keynes's ideas, this old book by Marcello de Cecco may still have a significant contribution to give in the literature on Keynes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As shown in a 2018 article by Cristiano and Paesani, the element of Phillips's 1958 article that immediately obtained attention in the policy debate was the estimate of the unemployment rate compatible with price stability. Building on this previous work and based on the unpublished papers of the Council on Prices, Productivity, and Incomes and other published sources, the present article throws fresh light on why the curve paper failed to influence policymaking. At least two reasons may account for this. First, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, works based on inferential statistics still failed to obtain widespread attention among professional economists in the United Kingdom. Second, Phillips's 1958 article came at the beginning of a process that led to the abandonment, for some time at least, of the idea of buying price stability at the cost of increasing the unemployment rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reconstructs the opinions expressed by academic economists in front of the Radcliffe Committee, whose Report was a document of considerable importance for the post-war theory of monetary policy. The Committee provided one of the first official occasions to discuss the nexus between inflation and unemployment in Britain and the role of monetary policy in achieving price stability. Analyzing the Report, the Memoranda and the Minutes of evidence put forth in front of the Committee, the article documents the innovative aspects of the Radcliffe doctrine on monetary issues and its complex connections with Keynesian and Post-Keynesian monetary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on existence of a stable inverse relation between unemployment and the rate of change of nominal wages in Great Britain. It mentions stable long-run trade-off which provided the authorities a menu of possible inflation-unemployment combinations for policy choices and led to simultaneous rises in in inflation and unemployment. It also mentions role of institutional and other factors such as trade union rivalry to the effect of devaluation on the cost of living.

Marshall, Pigou, and Keynes on one side of the Atlantic, and Fisher on the other, had different approaches to the quantity theory of money. But they shared its basic framework, with the result that theoretical discussions did not prevent some degree of mutual support on policy proposals. If a divergence there was, at this stage, this pertained the feasibility of Fisher's proposals, because Fisher's enthusiasm for reform could find no match at Cambridge. This notwithstanding, and although in varying degrees, Marshall, Pigou, and Keynes were sympathetic with Fisher's battle for "stable money." Indeed, a fragment from the Keynes Papers shows that, at a very early stage of his career, Keynes paid great attention to Fisher's empirical research on the relationship between "Appreciation and interest," taking the relation between nominal and real rates of interest as a possible explanation of the trade cycle. For some time at least, this widened the common ground upon which Fisher's proposals for "stable money" could find some support at Cambridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm,” new developments in the theory of the firm were under way in the works of Arnold Plant at the LSE, and Dennis Robertson, Frederick Lavington, and Austin Robinson among the Cambridge Marshallians. Although in disagreement on industrial policy, these economists shared the belief that the common view that bigger firms are always more efficient—a very popular view within the movement for industrial ‘rationalization’—was untenable from a theoretical point of view. In the works of these economists the ‘make or buy’ scheme is sometimes employed, and Coase’s idea of a cost for using the market can be found, in implicit form, in some writings of Plant that appeared before Coase’s article. But the fundamental principle that we now call “transaction costs” was hardly of any help to any of those who, at Cambridge as well as at the LSE, were insisting on the costs of coordination as a limit to the growth of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent Keynes, or any other speculator, could ever have used the theory of futures contracts he formulated in the 1920s as the guiding principle for their investment strategy and what light the theory can shed on speculative behaviour. To this end, we focus our attention on Keynes’ speculations on the cotton market. Our main conclusion is that Keynes did not base his speculation in cotton exclusively on the assumption that futures prices were downward biased in comparison with spot prices, as his theory would predict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Keynes's work on India before the First World War concentrated on analysis of the gold exchange standard and the stabilization of the rupee external value. Indian monetary arrangements were framed into a plan for foreign investment, implemented by the India Office in London. This policy, which was a typical example of public control over investments, occasioned Keynes's first job as an applied economist. Although neglected by Keynesian scholarship, this learning by doing experience is likely to have played a significant role in the young economist's training and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]