Equilibrium Economics and Business-Cycle Theory.

Original offprint. 8vo. [381]-415, [1] pp. Original printed wrappers, edges untrimmed (slightly edge worn, small chip to fore edge of front wrapper, otherwise a very good copy). Reprinted from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XLIV, May,

An extensive article tracing the development of business-cycle theory in economic thought, from a relatively peripheral issue in classic economics - usually dismissed as temporary disturbances caused by external factors, such as war or natural disaster - to an integral part of general economic theory. Kuznets highlights a tension between the then-burgeoning business-cycle theories and traditional equilibrium economics, attacking the static equilibrium concept dominant in the English-American tradition.

Kuznets calls instead for a "more realistic assumption, one that would allow the recognition of the extreme diversity of forms of behavior which we observe in reality, and would permit a deduction of both secular movements and cyclical fluctuations as parts of a normal state of economic phenomena" (p. 400). The article was published in the same year as Kuznet's important early work Secular Movements in Production Prices in which he "identified fluctuations of 15-20 years' duration in a number of economic time series for the United States", what would become known as 'Kuznet Cycles' (Blaug).

Stock Code: 233809