The Growing of Ramsey's Growth Model
研究了拉姆齐增长模型如何在1950-1960年代成为新古典增长文献的一部分,以及拉姆齐如何被奉为该领域的先驱。通过JSTOR检索和书籍参考,作者发现拉姆齐在1950年前的经济增长文献中已有影响。
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930) was a Cambridge mathematician who made important contributions not only to philosophy, mathematics, logic, and probability, but also to economics. Ramsey made two major contributions to economics, both published in the Economic Journal in 1927 and 1928, which became popular only in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, economists portrayed Ramsey as a sleeping giant: a mathematician who had almost no impact on the economics profession prior to 1950 because his mathematical analysis was out of the reach of the typical economist of his time. My goal in this article is to understand how Ramsey's growth model became part of the neoclassical literature on economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s and how Ramsey became a sacred predecessor of this field. In order to better understand the stabilization of Ramsey's growth model in postwar economics, I conduct a JSTOR search and consult a few book references. Based on this dataset, I conclude that Ramsey was in fact “awake” in the economic growth literature pre-1950. I discuss as well the main economists who transported Ramsey from the Cambridge milieu of the 1920s to the North American economics of the postwar period.