This Page is UNDER CONSTRUCTION but what to do with the Classical Economists has troubled me since the late 1970's. The project may take a long time to finish.
SUMMARY: I love reading original sources and hate most textbook summaries. The Classical Economists are a great read. But, if you have a scientific orientation, at some point you have to start testing things. There is no direct way to confirm or reject the Classical Economists. However, General Systems Theory has an answer (see Kalman, 1982, below). Determine what variables were of most interest to the Classics and put these variables into State Space Systems Model for testing on historical data (this is the approach taken by Higgins, B. (1968,1959, below). This is what I have been working on since the mid-1970s and some of the results are presented below.
If you have taken ECON 101 in College, you are unlikely to have read the Classical Economists: Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or Joseph Schumpeter (photos above).
And, you have probably not even read 20th Century economists John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman (photos above).
They were all interesting writers and should be part of the College curriculum, but maybe that is too much to ask. There is just too much to read in the 21st Century (you didn't read Albert Einstein in PHYSICS 101 or Sigmund Freud in PSYCH101, either). Their thinking has been distilled into models (the same as Einstein's thinking was distilled into
Notes
Kalman, R. E. (1982) Dynamic Econometric Models: A System-Theoretic Critique
Annales (2015) Debating the long Duree
Pasdirtz, G.W. (1981) Instability and Late Nineteenth Century German Development UW-Madison Thesis.
Higgins, B. (1968,1959) Principles of Economic Development
In this post I'll provide a list of models that you run using the R Programming language on my Google site.
- The Limits to Growth Jay Wright Forrester's World 1 model that started the The Limits to Growth (LTG) movement. The 1972 report discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. Classical Economists understood "limits to growth" but the idea was lost under Neoclassical Economics in the 20th Century.
- The Malthusian Model A Malthusian growth model, sometimes called a simple exponential growth model, is essentially exponential growth based on the idea of the function being proportional to the speed to which the function grows. The model is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), one of the earliest and most influential books on population.
- The Leibenstein Malthusian Model
- The Leibenstein Generalized Model
- The Leibenstein Controller Model
- The Adam Smith Model and the Smith Controller.
- The Adam Smith Small Country Model.
- The Adam Smith Exponential Growth Model
- The Schumpeter Model
- The Marxian Steady-State Model
- The Marxian Collapse Model
- The Marxian Cyclical Model
- Karl Marx's Philosophy In 1845, Karl Marx declared: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.
- The David Ricardo Cyclical Model
- IPCC Kaya Scenarios
- Kaya Growth State Space Models
Historical Controller Models
Classic References
These works are available on line:
- Adam Smith Wealth of Nations
- Malthus An Essay on the Principal of Population
- Malthus Principles of Political Economy
- Ricardo Collected Works
- Marx Collected Works
- JS Mill Collected Works
- JM Keynes The Collected Writings
- Milton Friedman Major Works
