tailieunhanh - An Outline of the history of economic thought - Chapter 10

10 Neoclassical Economics from Triumph to Crisis . The Neo-Walrasian Approach to General Economic Equilibrium . The conquest of the existence theorem The rise of Nazism led to a diaspora of intellectuals. All the fervour of study and debate which had enlivened Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s ended in the following decade | 10 Neoclassical Economics from Triumph to Crisis . The Neo-Walrasian Approach to General Economic Equilibrium . The conquest of the existence theorem The rise of Nazism led to a diaspora of intellectuals. All the fervour of study and debate which had enlivened Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s ended in the following decade and the move to the West began for the most important Mittel-European economists apart from those like Schlesinger who committed suicide or Remak who died in a concentration camp. Some settled in London but most went to the USA. At the end of the 1930s von Neumann Morgenstern Wald Leontief Tintner Marschak Frisch and many others were working in America. The presence of these economists in the American intellectual circles of the 1940s and 1950s had many effects on the evolution of general-equilibrium theory. Even if the resumption of the American studies on this theory was stimulated indirectly more by Hicks s Value and Capital than by the contributions of the members of the Viennese Kolloquium it is still true that the work of Wald von Neumann and Morgenstern gave a sharp impulse to that resumption. With the fixed-point theorem Wald and von Neumann had indicated the road to be taken to solve the existence problem. Moreover von Neumann and Morgenstern s 1944 book the Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour led among other things to the abandonment of traditional techniques of differential calculus and to a reorientation of mathematical economics towards the use of the techniques of convex analysis. An important contribution of that book was also the proof of the existence of solutions for a two-person zero-sum game a demonstration later generalized to an n-person game by John Nash in Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games 1950 . A decisive stimulus to the resumption of the American studies on general equilibrium was given by two works by Samuelson one of 1941 The Stability of Equilibrium Comparative Statics and Dynamics and one of 1947 .