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This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born Jewish immigrant then professor of economics at Babson College – wrote to Russell and Kahn asking for their personal reminiscences concerning Keynes’ anti-Semitic utterances. In their brief but still significant responses, both Russell and Kahn firmly denied any hint of anti-Semitism in Keynes, thereby providing significant first-hand testimonies from two of his closest acquaintances.

In 1933, Lionel Robbins asked Frank Knight if he could republish Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RUP) in order for students at the London School of Economics to continue to have access to the book. He also asked Knight to write a preface to provide an update on Knight’s changing economic views. Between 1933 and 1957, Knight wrote four new prefaces for reprint editions of RUP outlining changes in his views. In the prefaces, he identified four aspects of the theory expounded in RUP that he came to reject: (a) the method of successive approximation; (b) the separation of production from distribution; (c) the tri-partite division of the factors of production; and (d) any notion of a period of production. These rejections placed him squarely in opposition to F. A. Hayek’s theoretical work. He also identified the key features he had sought to develop in a monetary theory that would oppose J. M. Keynes and John Hicks. At the same time, he sought to identify the new theoretical ideas he was developing, including an enterprise-based theory of market exchange, and the adoption of a unitary resource, called capital. He also pointed to the work in social philosophy that he had begun in the 1940s, especially the need for a combined approach to social science using economic theory, ethics and social philosophy. The prefaces came to serve as a bridge between Knight’s original theory and what he would argue at the conclusion of his career.

The authors of this book (hereafter BLS) reject the notion that the term “capitalism” denotes a unique type of economic system and distinguish instead among four forms it can take: state-guided capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, big-firm capitalism, and entrepreneurial capitalism. As suggested by the terms “good capitalism, bad capitalism” in the title, they examine both the positive and the normative implications of each type of capitalism and how consistent each type has been, in the various economies that adopted it, with the overall objective of promoting growth and prosperity. This book is thus about economic systems, the principles on which they are built, and economic growth. There are occasional references to authors of the classical, neoclassical, and Keynesian eras such as Richard Cantillon, John M. Keynes, T. Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Smith, and Max Weber. Some of these are accompanied by brief quotations, but (as is to be expected from the very different interests of the authors of this book) no textual analysis of them or speculations about their influence on the history of economic thought. Given the authors’ emphasis on the effects of capitalism on economic growth, they also briefly discuss early theorists of economic growth such as Roy Harrod, Evsey Domar, Nicholas Kaldor, Robert Solow, and Trevor Swan and – in much greater detail – the theoretical, empirical, and historical work on growth theory that followed them, up to and including the “new growth theory” of Arrow, Romer, Lucas, and others. Chapters 2 and 3, titled “Why economic growth matters” and “What drives economic growth?,” introduce the general reader to the importance of economic growth to both developed and developing economies and the essentials of modern growth theory. While these are valuable supplements to the book for readers not familiar with them, these chapters are not discussed here since their main features are found in textbooks on economic development, macroeconomics, and growth theory.

The main thesis of the chapter is to introduce a new idea to the field of peace negotiations, which will require the development of a new model of negotiations to enforce peace. The existing models of peace negotiations highlight the existence of a positive peace dividend to parties involved in conflicts and peace negotiation. They, hence, usually highlight a gradual and dynamic adjustment, or movement, away from a conflict-ridden outcome towards a peaceful outcome that offers a positive peace dividend to all relevant stakeholders. In comparison with the status quo, peace brings additional economic returns and peace therefore offers a win–win situation. Despite the fact that a win–win situation does not ensure the enforcement of peace, as agents can easily get locked into what is commonly known as the prisoners' dilemma – yet the possibility of Pareto improvement makes negotiations for peace somewhat artificial. At least in the short run all agents involved in active conflicts are apprehensive of peace as they expect immediate (expected) returns from making peace can outweigh the expected returns from conflicts. An important work that sidesteps the win–win situation of peace dividends is by Isard and Azis (1999) who introduced the possibility of an immediate loss of economic returns from the peace process in their conflict management procedure (CMP). However, in the existing work on CMP, the long-run returns from peace outweigh that from conflicts. One therefore presumes that peace brings economic benefits to all. The existing CMPs therefore assume away any possibility of lower economic returns from peace. There are some important models in which peace negotiations are also modelled as a zero-sum game in which the gain of a party represents a loss to others, which is known as win–lose negotiations. In this work we introduce the possibility of bargaining and negotiations against the backdrop of potential immediate losses while peace is favoured simply for its intrinsic value and not for pecuniary returns. In the real world, there is evidence to believe that agents involved in conflicts are painfully aware of two things: first, the decision-making agents who choose between conflicts vis-à-vis peace are the leaders who get rarely affected by economic returns from conflicts or peace. It is usually the foot soldiers who bear the brunt of costly conflicts and can benefit from peace. Secondly, most people value peace for the sake of it as peace has an intrinsic value that ensures the protection of rights and their lives and protection from violence. Thus, peace is a collective good that provides little extra economic returns to actual decision-makers who choose between courses of conflicts or peace.

The anomalous patterns in foreign exchange markets have received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper empirically investigates the Day-of-the-Week effect in the yen-dollar currency market for three decades and confirms that such effect did exist for the period 1973–1989, but it disappears for the 1990s. The results remain unchanged when the business condition effect, the January effect, the holiday effect, and the first and last day of the month effect are controlled. The results suggest that financial deregulation in Japan has made foreign currency markets more efficient in recent years.