The Economics of Control.

LERNER, Abba (1903-1982):

Published by New York: Macmillan, 1944., 1944

About this Item

FIRST EDITION. Original cloth. Very Good+. 'In 1944 he published his most famous book, The Economics of Control (Macmillan, 1944), which had earned him a doctorate the year before at the University of London. The book had begun as a contribution to the economics of socialism but had soon grown into a statement of a completely general set of principles, based on the equation of marginal costs and marginal benefits, which could be applied by policy-makers to improve the performance of any economy, socialist or capitalist. In one sense, it was a reworking of Pigou s Economics of Welfare (1920) with the aid of general rather than partial equilibrium analysis but it paid much less attention to the institutional context of economic activity than Pigou s treatise. It was, in fact, a working out of the new welfare economics of the 1930s in which the only guide to practical policy was the maxim of Pareto . . . The Economics of Control contained two further features that attracted much attention: a utilitarian argument in favour of perfect equality in the distribution of income and a neo-Keynesian exposition of the principles of functional finance , according to which the size of deficits and surpluses in the government budget are to be judged solely with reference to the levels of employment and prices in the economy the public debt is in no sense an economic burden on future generations' (Mark Blaug, Great Economists Since Keynes, p. 138). Seller Inventory # 25018

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Economics of Control.

Publisher: New York: Macmillan, 1944.

Publication Date: 1944

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Edition: 1st Edition