Selective Rediscovery of Economic Ideas: What Keynes Found in Malthus

Abstract

controversy over internal versus external factors and their influence on the inception, initial development, selection and refinement of economic thought remains unresolved. Stigler [19,22], for example, argues, The dominant influence upon the working range of economic theorists is the set of internal values and pressures of the discipline. Factors internal to the discipline include: the body of economic literature, the methodology of economics, interactions between economists, etc. Other historians of economic thought, such as Gunnar Myrdal [17, 9; 18, 3, 53, 58], argue that economic ideas evolve in response to environmental circumstances, policy needs and the personal idiosyncrasies of economists; that is, in response to factors which are external to the discipline of economics. Whatever may be the causal influences at work, some process must govern the selection of particular economic ideas for further elaboration and application. primary purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of this process. My approach is to investigate J. M. Keynes's selective rediscovery, application and elaboration of certain ideas contained in the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus. paper is organized as follows. first section is documentary in nature. I relate Keynes's developing interest in Malthus's ideas to the circumstances which surrounded these developments. In section two, I analyze the factors which influenced Keynes's successive selection of Malthusian ideas. There I show that a combination of environmental