The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science

Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel | Ian McGilvray (trans.)

ISBN 10: 0262090287 / ISBN 13: 9780262090285

Published by MIT Press, 1990

About this Item

Octavo. Gray cloth boards with white lettering on spine, blue typographical dust jacket. Previous owner name stamp on bottom edge of text block, top edge of boards mildly sunned. Jacket has very light edge wear. Now in mylar. Jacket not clipped, binding sound, text clean and unmarked.

Seller Inventory # 008888

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262090287
• ISBN 13: 9780262090285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

This study of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of modern economies examines how economists define and categorize the market. It suggests that modeling a social science such as economics on the physical/mathematical sciences has created intractable problems, and that the basic structure of the theory needs rethinking.

A meticulously researched work in the field of mathematical economics and pure theory, The Invisible Hand traces the evolution of general economic equilibrium theory in its rich interaction with the physical sciences over a period of more than 150 years. The authors discuss how the "invisible hand" that balances physical processes was inspiration and model for the creation of general economic equilibrium theory.

Ingrao and Israel review fundamental concepts of the theory, showing how its early forms, strictly analogous to mechanical equilibrium, arose from the cultural atmosphere generated by Newtonianism and the French Enlightenment. They describe developments and changes in the theory from the work of Leon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto through restructuring by the Vienna group and John Von Neumann and the contributions of the Robbins group at the London School of Economics, to its current formulations in the work of Irving Fisher, Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Gerard Debreu.

Concluding chapters survey the results obtained in attempts to deal with questions of the existence of equilibrium, its uniqueness, and the problem of global stability. Ingrao and Israel find that the theory has arrived at a dead end, which raises serious doubts about the internal consistency of the basic model.

Bruna Ingrao is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Sassari and Giorgio Israel is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rome.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian