David Hume on Banking and Hoarding

David Hume on Banking and Hoarding

David Hume and Modern Economics

Hume’s contribution to modern economics is normally thought of in terms of his early statement of the quantity theory of money, and to a lesser extent his views on trade and development. At a methodological level the influence from his empiricism is commonly traced to the development of econometrics. But if we explore his philosophy more fully, we find a much richer set of ideas which can illum...

David Hume and Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia.

David Hume on Monetary Policy: A Retrospective Approach

Monetary policy is a modern idea of which David Hume is generally considered a precursor. Moreover, thanks to Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, he is often presented as one of the first and most illustrious endorser of monetarism. This paper argues against this view, and in agreement with Joseph Schumpeter, that Hume’s contribution to economics, while not insignificant, cannot claim any real no...

A Credit Market à la David Hume

The answer, according to Hume, could be the borrower’s “abhorrence of villainy and knavery”, but this could only be the case in “a civiliz’d state, when [the borrower] is train’d up according to a certain discipline and education”. This cannot be the answer, however, when the interaction is looked at from the perspective of man’s basic “rude and more natural condition”. Nor can the answer be fo...