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This article highlights Lauchlin Currie's monetary economics. Currie's most notable influence in the 1930s was in drafting the 1935 Banking Act, and this volume includes the memorandum that Currie prepared for Marriner Eccles to show to the U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November 1934. Eccles was being considered for the post of Governor of the Federal Reserve Board but told Roosevelt that his acceptance would be conditional on the latter's support for the proposals contained in that memorandum.

US government economists in the later years of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt were urged to treat the Soviet Union as an ally, in the interests of winning World War II and establishing the basis for peaceful cooperation after the war. The onset of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of McCarthyism sullied the reputations of many of them, especially the two most prominent: Lauchlin Currie (chief economist in the White House) and Harry Dexter White (chief economist in the Treasury). Close examination of the parallels between these two seemingly disparate cases reveals that recent attempts to revive the charges are no more firmly based than those of the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allyn Young's lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neoclassical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter-related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that microeconomic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]