History and Refractions of the Past: From Harold Hotelling's Economics of Exhaustible Resources to the 'Hotelling Rule'

Marion Gaspard ()
Additional contact information
Marion Gaspard: TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - IEP Lyon - Sciences Po Lyon - Institut d'études politiques de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - UJM EPE - Université Jean Monnet (EPSCPE) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This article traces the history of Harold Hotelling's paper on exhaustible resources. By combining historical inquiry − focusing on the content and issues of Hotelling's original work − and mnemo-history − examining the successive readings, then the context of the canonization of the article − it shows that Hotelling's success did not stem from gradual recognition but from a refraction of the past orchestrated by Robert Solow in the mid 1970s. Solow's tribute to Hotelling enduringly distorted the collective memory about the nature of Hotelling's contribution. The study invites historians and economists to rebuild a shared memory that aligns more closely with historical research.

Keywords: Harold Hotelling; Hotelling rule; Robert Solow; intertemporal distribution; exhaustible resources; history of economic thought; environmental economics; Histoire de la pensée économique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2026, Special Issue on Varieties of doing History of Economic Thought, 33 (4), pp.767-798. ⟨10.1080/09672567.2026.2698455⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:hal:journl:halshs-05786888

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2026.2698455

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().