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Commissioning and publishing autobiographical sketches by prominent economists has become something of a cottage industry at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University where the senior editor, Michael Szenberg, is based (Szenberg, 1992, 1998). This volume is the third major exercise in this genre. The first—entitled Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies—appeared in 1992. Some 22 outstanding economists (nine of whom were Nobel Laureates) contributed in this round. A second volume, published in 1998 under the title Passion and Craft: Economists at Work, solicited essays from economists a generation or so younger who were asked to write about how they practiced their profession. Twenty responded to this invitation. The volume under review returns to the “philosophy of life” theme and reports the responses of 26 contributors. A fair number of the essays in each of these volumes appeared originally in The American Economist, a journal edited by Szenberg.

In his bestselling The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner puts the focus on the visions and analyses of the great economic thinkers from Adam Smith to Joseph A. Schumpeter. Worldly philosophy is considered as a child of capitalism and worldly philosophers as system-builders addressing the long-run development of the economy and the society. This implies viewing the economy as historically and institutionally situated demanding a more interdisciplinary perspective and embedding economics in the social sciences. The article compares the work of Heilbroner and Adolph Lowe who was Heilbroner’s main mentor. The focus is on their reflections on Smith and Schumpeter. Heilbroner considered Smith as the first worldly philosopher of whose Wealth of Nations a German translation was published already in 1776 in Stuttgart, Lowe’s native city. Lowe’s early work on business cycles was strongly inspired by Marx and Schumpeter’s emphasis on the role of capital accumulation and technical progress as well as Schumpeter’s distinction between statics and dynamics. Lowe was forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany in spring 1933, only half a year after Schumpeter’s move to Harvard where Heilbroner studied in the late 1930s when Schumpeter enjoyed making provocative statements on the Great Depression which was still not yet overcome.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the flow of funds and growth variables for Latin America during the period of 1973–2000. To do so, we present a four equation econometric model that represents the traditional Monetarist and Keynesian perspectives. We also examine the hypothesis that the region can grow through gains from trade, through investigating trade as a source of growth from both computational general equilibrium (CGE) and Cournot-Nash equilibrium standpoints. Analyzing several scenarios, we determine that liberalization and reduced protectionism are superior strategies for Latin America.