Pioneers of Financial Economics: Das Adam Smith Irrelevanzproblem?

Geoffrey Poitras and Franck Jovanovic

History of Economics Review, 2010, vol. 51, issue 1, 43-64

Abstract: This paper is a contribution to the debate surrounding the steady decline in importance of the history of economic thought within the economics curriculum. The relevance of the history of financial economics to this debate is examined and a ‘histories of economic thought’ strategy is suggested to improve the future prospects of the subject. In the process, Das Adam Smith Irrelevanzproblem is identified and discussed. Das Irrelevanzproblem is concerned with the question: why do Adam Smith and other classical political economists continue to play such a central role in traditional thought when the relevance of these thinkers to modern economics, particularly new additions such as financial economics, is so limited? This paper demonstrates that the history of financial economics commences at least a century prior to The Wealth of Nations and is largely independent of the traditional thought which commences with the role of Adam Smith as the leading Enlightenment thinker on issues relevant to political economy.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/18386318.2010.11682155 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Pioneers of Financial Economics: Das Adam Smith Irrelevanzproblem? (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:51:y:2010:i:1:p:43-64

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rher20

DOI: 10.1080/18386318.2010.11682155

Access Statistics for this article

History of Economics Review is currently edited by John Harry Bloch and John Hawkins

More articles in History of Economics Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().