Re: Hume

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Yoshie and Ben:

Specie-flow is just a model Hume employed and he can't be blamed for
Rothbard's abuse of it 2 centuries after his death.

Hume *was* a very sophisticated social analyst, but I'd base the case on
his economic history and analyses of contemporary institutions.  A good
piece of exegesis is

Maragaret Schabas. 1994. "Market Contracts in the Age of Hume" pp.
117-134 in De Marchi and Morgan eds., _Higgling: Transactors and Their
Markets in the History of Economics._ Duke U Press.

She cites other lit on Hume.

Best, Colin

>>Last time I checked, Hume's price-specie flow model is still taught in

>>university economics classes to measure price and money supply
dynamics
>>under a gold standard. Not a bad concoction for someone whose
"universe"
>>implies that "identities in general are fiction, subject only to
customs."
>>Do we really need to abstract economic implications from the
/philosophy/
>>of one of the most influential political economists of the 18th
century?
>>
>>----Ben Day
>
> Apparently, Hume has exercised a worse influence on economists than
> on postmodernists (who tend to be sentimentally Keynesian & social
> democratic, even though their epistemology does not accord well with
> their sentiment).
>
> *****   What Has Government Done to Our Money?
>
> Murray N. Rothbard