Jürg Niehans Quotes

“There is a widespread impression today that the history of economics is a sequence of revolutions and counter-revolutions, successive schools rising to dominance just to be deposed in a crisis by another school. According to this view, paraphrasing Marx, all history of economics is a history of school struggles, punctuated by revolutions.”

Jürg Niehans

Jürg Niehans, " Revolution and evolution in economic theory https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%20Discussion%20Papers/1992/92-20%20Niehans,%20J.pdf." The Australian Quarterly (1993): 498-515.

“The equilibrium price level is determined at the point where the money market is in equilibrium. The temporary suspension of Walras' Law, far from making economic nonsense, thus appears as the crucial "trick" by which the tatonnement process is decomposed in two parts.
This analysis confirms that for a neoclassical general equilibrium system with neutral money there is indeed a consistent decomposition procedure, based on appropriate compensation principles, permitting the determination of real variables in the real sector while the price level is determined in the monetary sector. However, the amount of intellectual effort which, in the wake of Lange and Patinkin, was devoted to this issue, is entirely out of proportion to its economic significance. The real economic question is not whether a system can be dichotomized, but whether money is neutral.”

Jürg Niehans

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 12

“If one could be perfectly certain that everybody always stays within his budget constraint, everybody could be allowed to obtain goods without a specific quid pro quo.”

Jürg Niehans

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 63

“Economics should be under no illusion that central banking will ever become a science.”

Jürg Niehans

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 296

“Money is here called the a medium and not, as customary, a unit of account because, clearly, money itself is not a unit, but the good whose unit is used as the unit of account.”

Jürg Niehans

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 118