This book explores the neglected contribution of the American and English “psychological” school to economic theory, especially to the development and refinement of the Austrian school of economics. It argues that Frank Knight, Frank Fetter, Herbert Davenport, Philip Wicksteed and J.B. Clark among others improved on the original Austrian theory by Menger and Bohm-Bawerk by providing a coherent subjectivist foundation for the theories of production and distribution. They succeeded where economic theory before them failed – to develop the theories of interest, profit, wages and rents based solely on the principles of subjective value and marginal utility, eschewing the last remnants of the old cost of production models. This book represents a look at what mainstream economic theory might have looked like had the erasure of Mengerian Austrian price theory by Marshallian and Walrasian thoeries not taken place, and had the improvements and refinements of the Mengerian tradition, itself done by the Anglo-Saxon followers of Menger, been fully appropriated.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Menger and Bohm-Bawerk. Weaknesses: rent, interest, production, distribution.- Chapter 3: Price, cost and utility: A theory of entrepreneurship (Wicksteed, Davenport, Fetter).- Chapter 4: Marginal productivity theory (Carver, Clark, Davenport, Wicksteed).- Chapter 5: Theory of rent (Fetter).- Chapter 6: Pure time preference theory of interest (Fischer, Fetter).- Chapter 7: Competition and monopoly (Fetter, Clark, Wicksteed, Davenport).- Chapter 8: Mises and Rothbard – what they took from the psychological school.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.
About the author
Ivan Jankovic is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. His background is in economic theory and the history of political and economic ideas. His previous book “The American Counter-revolution in Favor of Liberty – How Americans Resisted the Modern State 1765-1850” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.
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