Abstract
Johan Gustav Knut Wicksell was born in Stockholm on 20 December 1851, the youngest of six children of Johan and Christina Wicksell. One child died in infancy, so Knut grew up with three sisters a few years older than he, and a brother, Axel, one year older.
Selected works
1890a. Tomme maver — og fulde magasiner [Empty stomachs and full stores]. Samtiden [Contemporary Times, a Norwegian periodical] 1, 245–7, 293–320.
1890b. Überproduction oder Überbevölkerung [Excess production or excess population]. Zeitschrift für die gesamten Staatswissenschaften 46. les o. Kapitalzins und Arbeitslohn [Interest and wages]. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie 59, 552–74.
1893. Über Wert, Kapital, und Rente. Jena: G. Fischer. Trans. S.H. Frowein as Value, Capital and Rent, London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Reprinted, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970.
1894. Vara skatter: hvilka betalar dem, och hvilka border betala? [Our taxes: who pays them, and who ought to pay them?] Stockholm. This was one of Wicksell’s early and very popular tracts, written under the pseudonym of Sven Trygg. It provides non-technical background and may be viewed as an introduction to Wicksell (1896).
1896. Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen nebst Darstellung und Kritik des Steurewesens Schwedens. Jena: G. Fischer. Pages iv-vi, 76–87 and 101–59 trans. J.M. Buchanan as Chapter 6 of Classics of Public Finance, ed. R.A. Musgrave and A.T. Peacock, London: Macmillan, 1958; 2nd edn, 1967. This treatise has only been translated in part; the untranslated sections deal with an historical sketch of the development of Sweden’s system of taxation from the early 16th century up to the 1890s.
1898. Geldzins und Güterpreise bestimmenden Ursachen. Jena: G. Fischer. Trans. R.F. Kahn as Interest and Prices. A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money, London: Macmillan, 1936.
1900. Om gränsproduktiviteten såsom grundval för den nationalekonomiska fördelningen. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 2, 305–37. Trans, as ‘Marginal productivity as the basis for distribution in economics’ in Selected Papers on Economic Theory by Knut Wicksell, ed. E. Lindahl, London: Allen & Unwin, 1958.
1901. The theory of exchange in its final form. In Föreläsningar i nationalekonomi. Haft I. Stockholm, Lund: Fritzes, Berlingska. The 3rd Swedish edn (1928) of this volume translated by E. Classen as Lectures on Political Economy. Vol. 1: General Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934.
1902. Till fördelningsproblemet. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 4, 424–33. Translated as ‘On the problem of distribution’, in Selected Papers on Economic Theory by Knut Wicksell, ed. E. Lindahl, 1958.
1904. Mal och medel i nationalekonomien. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 6, 457–74. Translated as ‘Ends and means in economics’ in Selected Papers on Economic Theory by Knut Wicksell, ed. E. Lindahl, 1958.
1905. Socialiststaten och nutidssamhället [The socialist state and contemporary society]. Stockholm. A popular tract, 40 pp.
1906. Föreläsningar i nationalekonomi. Häft II: Om penningar och kredit. Stockholm and Lund: Fritzes, Berlingska. The 3rd Swedish edn (1929) trans. E. Classen, ed. L. Robbins, as Lectures on Political Economy. Vol. 2: Money, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935; reprinted 1946.
1907. Krisernas gåta. Statsekonomisk Tidskrift. Oslo. Trans, by CG. Uhr as ‘The enigma of business cycles’ in International Economic Papers No. 3 (1953), 58–74. This article expands on and lifts to a higher level of analysis the rather primitive treatment of business cycles presented in Wicksell (1890a and 1890b) and in Wicksell’s brief ‘Note on trade cycles and crises’ in Lectures on Political Economy, vol. 2.
1910. Läran om Befolkningen, dess Sammansättning och Förändringar [Theory of population, its composition, and modes of change]. Stockholm: A. Bonniers, 92 pp. A popular tract written while Wicksell served a two-month jail sentence in southern Sweden for disturbing the religious peace by public blasphemy in a public lecture he had given in Stockholm in 1908.
1919a. Växelkursernas gåta. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 21, 87–103. Trans, as ‘The riddle of the foreign exchanges’ in Selected Papers on Economic Theory by Knut Wicksell, ed. E. Lindahl, 1958.
1919b. Professor Cassels ekonomiska system. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 21, 195–226. This article, highly critical of several of Cassel’s interpretations and formulations of economic theory, has been translated and added as Appendix 1 in Lectures on Political Economy, vol. 1, 1934.
1923. Realkapital och kapitalränta. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 25, 145–80. A review and a mathematical elucidation of the analysis in G. Akerman’s doctoral dissertation Realkapital und Kapitalzins, Lund, 1923. It has been translated and added to Lectures on Political Economy, vol. 1, as Appendix 2, ‘Real Capital and Interest’. Among other things, this article features demonstrations of both the ‘Wicksell effect’ and the reversal of that ‘effect’ in an effort to determine the relationship between the optimum durability of fixed capital and the rate of interest. As such, this article, long after Wicksell’s death, has played an important role in the controversy over capital theory between the Cambridge (England) and Cambridge (Massachusetts) economists.
1925. Valutaspörsmalet i de skandinaviska länderna. Ekonomisk Tidskrift 27, 103–25. This article has been translated and added to Interest and Prices as an Appendix as ‘The Monetary Problem of the Scandinavian Countries’. It represents the several qualifications Wicksell was moved to add to his norm of price level stabilization for monetary policy, qualifications both to meet Davidson’s criticism of this norm and to incorporate lessons from the monetary experiences and upheavals of the First World War and its aftermath in the early 1920s. The qualifications were introduced to make allowance for significant increases in productivity, and for something like its opposite, severe commodity shortages due to wartime blockades, crop failure and also for significant issues of fiat money by governments running large deficit budgets, and so on.
Bibliography
Blaug, M. 1985. Economic Theory in Retrospect, 4th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 12, especially ‘Reader’s Guide to Lectures on Political Economy, vol. I’, pp. 546–565: see also some of the earlier part of this chapter, pp. 498–519. Chapter 15, ‘Reader’s Guide to WickselPs Lectures, vol. 2’, pp. 646–51, and also in the earlier part of this chapter, pp. 637–45.
Gârdlund, T. 1958. The Life of Knut Wicksell Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. The original Swedish version of this biography; Kunt Wicksell — Rebell i Det Nya Riket [Rebel in a new realm], Stockholm, 1956, is somewhat longer than the English version, largely because it contains, but the English omits, notes on source materials and valuable bibliographical data, pp. 374–405.
Hedlund-Nyström, T. and Jonung, L. 1986. Knut WickselPs opublicerade manuscript. 2 vols. Mimeo, Department of Economics, University of Lund.
Jonung, L. 1987. Knut WickselPs unpublished manuscripts. Mimeo, Department of Economics, University of Lund.
Uhr, CG. 1951. Knut Wicksell — a centennial evaluation. American Economic Review 41, 829–60.
Uhr, CG. 1960. Economic Doctrines of Knut Wicksell. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Uhr, C.G. (2008). Wicksell, Johan Gustav Knut (1851–1926). In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-58802-2_1828
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