Macroeconomics in Retrospect: The Selected Essays of David Laidler

David Laidler is one of the leading scholars in the history of economic thought and macroeconomics. This important collection brings together nineteen of his essays on topics in the history of macroeconomics. It begins with a paper on Adam Smith and ends with a discussion of the implications of Newclassical economists' ideas on the role of economic ideas in conditioning agents' activites. Other chapters deal with the major themes developed by monetary economists in the intervening years. Two of the essays appear in their current form for the first time, and several others are reprinted from difficult-to-obtain sources. They should be of interest not just to historians of economic thought, but also to economists more generally.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction 1. Adam Smith as a Monetary Economist 2. Rules, Discretion and Financial Crises in Classical and Neoclassical Monetary Economics 3. Two Views of the Lender of Last Resort: Thornton and Bagehot 4. Thomas Tooke on Monetary Reform 5. Alfred Marshall and the Development of Monetary Economics 6. From Bimetallism to Monetarism: The Shifting Political Affiliation of the Quantity Theory 7. Monetary Explanations of the Weimar Republic’s Hyperinflation: Some Neglected Contributions in Contemporary German Literature 8. Variations on a Two-Interest-Rate Theme 9. The Austrians and the Stockholm School: Two Failures in the Development of Modern Macroeconomics? 10. Hawtrey, Harvard, and the Origins of the Chicago Tradition 11. More on Hawtrey, Harvard and Chicago 12. Wage and Price Stickiness in Macroeconomics: An Historical Perspective 13. What was New about Liquidity Preference Theory? 14. Radcliffe, the Quantity Theory, and Monetarism 15. Hicks’s Later Monetary Thought 16. The Emergence of the Phillips Curve as a Policy Menu 17. Some Aspects of Monetarism circa 1970: A View from 1994 18. The Legacy of the Monetarist Controversy 19. The Role of the History of Economic Thought in Modern Macroeconomics Index

About the Author :
David Laidler, formerly Bank of Montreal Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario and former Fellow in Residence, C.D. Howe Institute, Toronto, Canada

Review :
'There is never a dull moment in David Laidler's essays. He writes relatively thick history, emphasising complexities and paradoxes, but with a very sharp pen and very strong opinions. . . this is a valuable collection.' 'The subjects of all these papers continue to reward study and argument, and I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in current monetary problems, which cannot be sharply distinguished from those of earlier times and about which we are still arguing.'