An Eponymous Dictionary of Economics: A Guide to Laws and Theorems Named after Economists

RR 2006/246 An Eponymous Dictionary of Economics: A Guide to Laws and Theorems Named after Economists Edited by Julio Segura and Carlos Rodriguez Braun Edward Elgar Cheltenham and Northampton, MA 2004 xxviii + 280 pp. ISBN 1 84376 029 0 £90 $150

Keywords Dictionaries, Economics

Review DOI 10.1108/09504120610672809

The history and practice of economics is rich in the ideas and insights of particular economists, econometrists and statisticians. In this field, as in others, an eponymous approach, which recognizes the name behind the law, theorem or interpretation, opens up the links between ideas and people, an area of academic or practical inquiry and the historiographie setting in which it has evolved. Eponymy was recognized by Merton as an aspect of the sociology of science, and Stigler suggests that "names" in terms like the Edgeworth box and the Pigou effect and Pareto optimality may reflect more the reward system than the ideas themselves. Certainly here, the high density of economics Nobel prize-winners indicates that recognition comes with ideas (though bibliometrics suggests not necessarily the other way round).

This new dictionary, edited by two Spanish economists and contributed to by many more, sets out its hybrid stall in a well-established market of dictionaries on economics (like Black (2003) and Bannock et al. (2003)), a mass of reference books on eponyms (very few on economics, it must be said), and a wealth of introductory...