Josef Steindl, the Trieste School and the BNL Quarterly Review

Abstract

The paper provides an introduction to the special issue in honour of Josef Steindl (1912-1993) celebrating the centennial anniversary of his birth. Steindl contributed to the theory of the firm, applying a stochastic methodology to study firms’ growth and their distribution by size; to the analysis of technology and education, stressing among other things the link between technical progress and skilled manpower requirements; to growth and business cycle theory, connecting the basic idea of a tendency to stagnation in a capitalist economy to Keynesian-Kaleckian macroeconomics and to a post-Keynesian theory of income distribution where investments determine profits; to the analysis of personal income distribution through the use of stochastic processes, with a critique of the traditional mainstream interpretation of the so-called Pareto Law. Behind all this, there was a general vision of the economy and society in which history, institutions and social tensions all played a central role. Relying on all this, there was a constant flow of applied analyses, always rich in intuition, aimed at understanding the real world so as to be able to better intervene in it in support of human progress. JEL Codes: B31, O40, E32, O33