Copyrights to papers in the Duke Economics Working Paper Archive remain with the authors or their assignees. Archive users may download papers and produce them for their own personal use, but downloading of papers for any other activity, including reposting to other electronic bulletin boards or archives, may not be done without the written consent of the authors.

Duke Economics Working Paper #02-19

A Retrospective View of Hicks' Capital and Time: A Neo-Austrian Theory


Edwin Burmeister

Abstract

In 1973 Sir John Hicks published Capital and Time: A Neo-Austrian Theory. This was his third book with the word "capital" in its title, the first being his classic Value and Capital [1939] and the second being Capital and Growth [1965]. It departed significantly from his earlier work by assuming that the technology of an economy consisted of a set of neo-Austrian production processes in which a time sequence of inputs produces a time sequence of outputs. In June, 1974 I published a review article in the Journal of Economic Literature entitled "Synthesizing the Neo-Austrian and Alternative Approaches to Capital Theory: A Survey" using Hicks' book as a filter to select a list of topics for discussion. Now, with some 30 years of hindsight, I will revisit some of those topics that, in my view, remain both unsolved and important.

Keywords: Hicks, Capital Theory, Austrian Capital Theory, Economic Growth, Neo-Austrian, Time, Capital, Technology, Production Process, Truncation

JEL: B2, B3, C6, O00, E0

Retrieve document:

39 pages

  Help on downloading documents