GERRIT GORTER
The present study of economics did not, of course, come out of thin air. Although thinkers in classical Greece already reflected on what we now call economics, it was largely in the eighteenth century that systematic thought on the subject began.
Two conceptual tools—the economic cycle and the idea of the invisible hand—date from that century and are still in use today, both in academic research and in education.
This site contains twenty-five portraits of important economists. Each offers a biographical sketch together with an indication of his (and, in one case, her) significance for the development of economic thought. They claim no more than to provide a first introduction to the lives and works of these pioneers.
These articles originally appeared in Dutch in the Tijdschrift voor het Economisch Onderwijs and were published on the website of Gerrit Gorter. The English translations are by Folkert Gorter.
Index
François Quesnay
Adam Smith
Thomas Robert Malthus
Jean-Baptiste Say
David Ricardo
Antoine Augustin Cournot
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx
Walras
Carl Menger
Alfred Marshall
Vilfredo Pareto Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
Knut Wicksell
Max Weber
Irving Fisher
Sam de Wolff
John Maynard Keynes
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
Joan Robinson
Jan Tinbergen
John Hicks
John Kenneth Galbraith
Milton Friedman
Paul Samuelson
Sam de Wolff
The Netherlands 1878–1960
The Netherlands has produced few internationally renowned economists. Of course, there’s Jan Tinbergen, who passed away in 1994 — the first economist to receive the Nobel Prize, together with the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch. In the nineteenth century, N.G. Pierson still enjoyed a certain degree of renown — but that’s about it. That said, the province of Friesland has produced a few economists who should not be overlooked. Think, for instance, of Jelle Zijlstra, the former president of De Nederlandsche Bank who passed away not too long ago, or of Wim Duisenberg, the first president of the European Central Bank.
Also belonging on the list of Frisian economists is Salomon de Wolff, born in 1878 in the town of Sneek. As an economist, De Wolff is best known for his major work Het economisch getij: bijdrage tot de verklaring van het conjunctuurverschijnsel (The Economic Tide: A Contribution to the Explanation of the Business Cycle), published in 1929. Today, the term business cycle refers to short-term fluctuations in the economy around its trend growth. De Wolff, however, studied the so-called long wave movement. He discerned in economic history a cyclical pattern lasting roughly fifty years. Based on the theory he developed around this long cycle — a theory grounded in Marxist thought — he predicted the crisis of the 1930s, a prediction that proved both timely and strikingly accurate. This scientific achievement attracted considerable international attention.
De Wolff had already expressed interest in the long wave movement as early as 1915. In the international literature, the discovery of the long cycle is generally attributed — following the lead of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter — to the Russian Nikolai Kondratieff, who did not publish on the subject until 1922. De Wolff, then, was ahead of him. And even De Wolff was not the first: that distinction belongs to the Dutch Marxist J. van Gelderen, who had written about it back in 1913.
Even after the 1930s, a pattern can be observed that, at the very least, does not contradict the long wave theory: strong economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s, stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by another period of growth in the 1990s. The years after 2000, incidentally, saw several sharp downturns — even though De Wolff had predicted at least another ten years of above-average growth.
De Wolff was a colorful figure who was anything but idle. He played a significant role in the SDAP, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party — the predecessor of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA). In addition, as a Jew, he was a committed supporter of Zionism. To him, socialism and Zionism were closely aligned. Both were emancipation movements, and in his view, workers and Jews could be free only in a world without capitalist exploitation.
World War II did not pass him by unnoticed. He spent some time in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp — a period he would later remain deeply silent about. Because he held a so-called Palestine certificate, he was eventually allowed to leave for Palestine in 1944. Until the end of the war, he taught business cycle theory in Tel Aviv. After the war, he returned to the Netherlands and once again became politically active — this time in the Labour Party (PvdA). He also gained recognition among the general public through his contributions to a then well-known radio segment called Radiolympus.
De Wolff always considered himself a Marxist — though not in a dogmatic sense: he believed more in the Marxist method than in Marxism itself. In hindsight, a very sensible position. Despite his socialist sympathies, it’s highly doubtful whether he would feel at home in today’s Labour Party (PvdA), which seems to have embraced market thinking with open arms. De Wolff died in 1960. The Labour Party (PvdA) honored him by draping his coffin with the same red flag that had once covered the coffin of Pieter Jelles Troelstra — the party’s founding figure and a leading socialist in Dutch political history.