The aim of our paper is to study the intellectual origins of policy selection at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), putting together the new findings in economic history with the achievements in the history of economic thought in this field. Founded in 1930 to cope with the German reparations problem, the BIS encouraged Central Bank Cooperation. Its official and unofficial decision-making takes place at the monthly Governors' Meeting, while its daily operation is handled by the back offices. Among these offices, the Monetary and Economic Department was the most important for its theoretical activities.
In this study, we focus on a man who led the policy of the BIS from the 1930s to the 1950s: Per Jacobsson. Born in 1894 in Sweden, Jacobsson began his career as an international economist while moving in the circle of Stockholm School of Economics. Jacobsson has been at the head of the Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS for over 20 years. Through this man, exceptionally productive in both theory and practice, we will observe the process through which a certain intellectual trend of idea develops in the BIS. We will pay special attention to Jacobsson's relationship with Knut Wicksell, whose thought would be an influence on this international institution.

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In the early nineteenth-century, attempts were made to apply the labor theory of value in transactions based on “labor notes, ” or certificates obliging the bearer to perform labor in exchange for goods. Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Josiah Warren (1798-1874) both made such attempts. This paper is a comparative study of the ideas on labor notes in the theories of Robert Owen and Josiah Warren. Considerable research has been done on labor note theory, but so far the thinking of Warren and his experiments in the United States have received relatively little attention. My purpose here is to clarify the ideas of Warren in their theoretical and practical dimensions and compare them with those of Owen.
Three factors may account for the still inadequate research on Warren's theory and its relation with Owen's theory. First, Marxist theory rejects the practice of labor notes as unfeasible, and considers the theory behind them to be “utopian” Second, contemporary research is affected by the failure of Owen's projects at New Harmony (1825-27, Indiana) and the National Equitable Labour Exchange (1832-34, London). This is the state of affairs in nineteenth-century English discourse. Third, most studies dealing with the theory behind labor notes are chiefly biographical treatments of Owen, despite the fact that Warren participated in New Harmony, and it influenced the development of his unique theory. In resuscitating Warren's ideas, specifically his labor notes theory, I propose that they represent a forgotten stage in nineteenth-century American thought, and for that reason merit serious study.
In order to shed light on Warren's theory and that ‘forgotten stage, ’ I examine the relationship of Owen and Warren in New Harmony from four perspectives: their ideas and practices regarding forms of ownership; the problem of evaluating labor time; how to issue labor notes; and the relationship between price as a function of labor time and price as a representation of monetary value.

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In his 1817 pamphlet on the conditions of the laboring classes, John Barton (1789-1852) argued that the introduction of machinery would reduce the demand for labor not only when the amount of capital was held constant, but also in the case of capital accumulation. Schumpeter noted that Barton surpassed the other classical economists in his recognition of the substitutability of capital for labor, but Schumpeter's interpretation could lead to the conclusion that Barton did not intend to show that a reduction in the demand for labor would occur as a consequence of the introduction of machinery. This paper examines the assumptions behind Schumpeter's perspective and investigates theoretical problems in Barton's argument.
In his treatment of factor substitution, Barton reasoned that all laborers displaced by machinery would soon find jobs as real wages fell. As for the accumulation of capital, in Barton's analysis additional capital in the form of machinery would be introduced in response to higher real wages, leading to a reduction in the wage share of total income.
The letter he received from Ricardo on 20 May 1817 led Barton to consider that introducing machinery would bring about a reduction in the demand for labor even when the amount of capital was increased. However, he was not able to distinguish the effect of machinery from the effect of capital accumulation on employment.
Though there were theoretical problems in Barton's attempt to show the effects of the introduction of machinery on employment, his thinking on machinery was later developed by Marx into the theory of an industrial reserve army of labor.

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Over the past decade, a number of economists at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University, including myself, have been conducting experiments to test theories regarding the provision of public goods. One of our more interesting findings to date is evidence among Japanese of a trait that can be described as “spite” in the way it impacts the provision of public goods. This paper describes the purposes, method, and some results of those experiments.
We have been forced to ponder economic methodology in every phase of this project. We considered the methods of neo-classical economists such as Walras and Pareto, for example, who tended primarily to analyze data without concern for the motives behind strategic choices, and we examined the approach of those experimentalists who put forth questions only after finishing their tests. To develop our own methodology, therefore, it seemed reasonable and legitimate to pose questions midway through our experiments in order to elicit the factors behind strategic choices.
That reasoning led to questions concerning the validity of behavioral assumptions made by neo-classical economists, moving us well away from Milton Friedman, who pays little attention to whether those assumptions are valid or not. In this way, experimentalists in this area, including ourselves, have begun to study behavior in terms of whether it is altruistic, spiteful, or fair in the provision of public goods.
In our experiments, we found that the first priority for several subjects was not the total payoff amount they could expect to receive but the ranking among them. Comparing American subjects with Japanese, we found that the American subjects tended to behave as game theory would predict, while some Japanese subjects adopted 'spiteful' strategies initially and demonstrated cooperative behavior later.
Today, we believe that understanding human behavior is the central issue in social science. Adam Smith, David Hume, and other eighteenth-century thinkers were interested in the sentiment and emotion behind economic decisions, but for a long time neoclassical economists of the last century effectively avoided the factor of motivation behind human behavior. By describing the experimental method, I hope that this paper will help to open a new and challenging path to understand human economic behavior and may contribute to the development of a new economics for this century.

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This article is a survey of recent studies concerning W. Whewell, R. Jones, C. Babbage, and others in the Cambridge network. These were the Cantabrigians who launched the methodological attack on Ricardian, or orthodox, political economy, and historians of economics have lumped them together as the Cambridge inductivist group. Work in the history of science, however, has long established that the members of this “group” were by no means in full accord regarding methodology. Whewell, in fact, the pivotal figure in the network, did not follow an inductivist approach in his scientific methodology. Recently scholars have begun to recognize that each of the several methodological approaches represented in the group deserves its own distinct place in the history of economics.
Why did the Cantabrigians join forces to undermine orthodoxy and attempt to form an alliance with Malthus, even though their methodological views were, to one degree or another, at variance? Various explanations have been proposed, and although there is still no consensus on the answer, the dispute itself is proving to be productive, perhaps more so than the arguments centering on the methodology.
While their attacks on classical orthodoxy have been studied in some detail, the kind of economics the Cantabrigians taught and were taught have received less attention from researchers. It has been often assumed, for example, that Pryme, the first professor of the subject at the university, was a minor follower of Whewell. Recent findings, however, suggest that he was primarily a disciple of orthodoxy, and possibly an adversary of Whewell, Jones, and Babbage, all of whom had visions of the coming industrial society as technology-driven and class-harmonious.
Some recent studies indicate that the anti-Ricardian academics not only had lasting influence on the university (in spite of Pryme) and the East India College, but also upon newly established societies for economic research. A more complete understanding of their influence will shed new light upon what is called the Decline of Ricardian Economics and the emergence of Jevonsian and Marshallian economics.

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