Economy and Interest

"The essential work from the Nobel Prize-winning virtuoso of twentieth-century economics, translated to English for the first time. Since Adam Smith developed a verbal theory of how the economy worked, economists have used mathematical equations to try to model such terms. Few figures advanced this frontier more than twentieth-century French economist Maurice Allais, whose sweeping intellectual contributions earned the Nobel Prize for economics and drew comparisons to the works of Leon Walras to Vilfredo Pareto. Allais's formidable accomplishments have been largely unread by non-Francophone readers due to the challenge of their translation; the works' technical erudition and occasional density have vexed generations of translators and publishers. The effects of this gap are immeasurable. As Paul Samuelson wrote, "Had Allais's earliest writings been in English, a whole generation of economic theory would have taken a different course." Economy and Interest is the milestone translation of Allais's most influential and acclaimed work, one whose staggering original findings predate their accepted formulations by other famed economists decades later. In its sweep and technical virtuosity, along with its fundamental rewriting of how neoclassical economics were formulated, is certain to stagger, delight, and challenge new generations of English-language readers."--