The Lausanne School of economics, sometimes referred to as the Mathematical School, refers to the neoclassical economics school of thought surrounding Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto. It is named after the University of Lausanne, at which both Walras and Pareto held professorships. Polish economist Leon Winiarski is also said to have been a member of the Lausanne School. [1]
The term Lausanne School was first coined by the mathematician Hermann Laurent in his article Petit traite d'economie politique mathematique (Small Treatise on Mathematical Political Economy). [2] The central feature of the Lausanne School was its development of general equilibrium theory. Laurent's article presented a simplified version of this theory. [2]
Lausanne School is also associated with the Italian School and the Paretian School, which were based on the works of Pareto. [3] Italian economic historians have adopted Luigi Einaudi's description that the age of the Lausanne School in Italy should be called "Italian school". [3] The school is distinguished from the work of Alfred Marshall by the way it maintains the necessity of considering the interaction of all parts of the economy simultaneously so that the behavior that occurs within any part of it can be understood. [4] Marshall, on the other hand, preferred to solve economic problems using mathematics as the instrument, with the theorist drawing out conclusions instead of coming up with solutions through the process of verbal reasoning. [4]
The Lausanne School attempted to answer the question of whether the welfare of an economy can be measured. [5] Its theorists such as Walras proposed that it can be done through a notion of justice in exchange called "commutative justice", which required all traders to face the same price, which did not change, for a given product. This free competition is said to produce "maximum welfare", allowing for an effective evaluation of questions of welfare. [6] Hans Mayer argued against Lausanne School, citing that its assumptions are unrealistic and that the utility of a good cannot be measured, infinitely divided, nor indefinitely substituted. [7]
Members of the Lausanne School include Basile Samsonoff, Marie Kolabinska, and Pierre Boven, who were all students of Pareto. [8]
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory, a theory that has come under considerable question in recent years.
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off. The concept is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian civil engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. The following three concepts are closely related:
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Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium. The definition of the role of the entrepreneur found in it was also taken up and amplified by Joseph Schumpeter.
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Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.
Michio Morishima was a Japanese heterodox economist and public intellectual who was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics from 1970–88. He was also professor at Osaka University and member of the British Academy. In 1976 he won the Order of Culture.
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Enrico Barone was a soldier, military historian, and an economist.
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Zoltan J. Acs is an American economist. He is Professor of Management at The London School of Economics (LSE), and a professor at George Mason University, where he teaches in the Schar School of Policy and Government and is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy. He is also a visiting professor at Imperial College Business School in London and affiliated with the University of Pecs in Hungary. He is co-editor and founder of Small Business Economics.
In the history of economic thought, a school of economic thought is a group of economic thinkers who share or shared a common perspective on the way economies work. While economists do not always fit into particular schools, particularly in modern times, classifying economists into schools of thought is common. Economic thought may be roughly divided into three phases: premodern, early modern and modern. Systematic economic theory has been developed mainly since the beginning of what is termed the modern era.
Mark Blaug FBA was a Dutch-born British economist, who covered a broad range of topics during his long career.
Involuntary unemployment occurs when a person is unemployed despite being willing to work at the prevailing wage. It is distinguished from voluntary unemployment, where a person refuses to work because their reservation wage is higher than the prevailing wage. In an economy with involuntary unemployment, there is a surplus of labor at the current real wage. This occurs when there is some force that prevents the real wage rate from decreasing to the real wage rate that would equilibrate supply and demand. Structural unemployment is also involuntary.
Mathematical economics is the application of mathematical methods to represent theories and analyze problems in economics. Often, these applied methods are beyond simple geometry, and may include differential and integral calculus, difference and differential equations, matrix algebra, mathematical programming, or other computational methods. Proponents of this approach claim that it allows the formulation of theoretical relationships with rigor, generality, and simplicity.
David Michael Garrood Newbery, CBE, FBA, is a Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge. He got this position in 1988. He specializes in the field of energy economics, and he writes on the regulation of electricity markets. His interests also include climate change mitigation and environmental policy, privatisation, and risk.
Ruth Towse FRSA is a British economist and Professor of Economics of Creative Industries at Bournemouth University and Professor Emerita at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. A leading authority in cultural economics with a particular emphasis on the economics of media and copyright, she has taught in UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Thailand universities. She was married to Mark Blaug.