We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

Economic history is the most quantitative branch of history, reflecting the interests and profiting from the techniques and concepts of economics. This essay, first published in 1977, provides an extensive contribution to quantitative historiography by delivering a critical guide to the sources of the numerical data of the period 1700 to 1850. This title will be of interest to students of history, finance and economics.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical foundations of economics, from basic set theory to fixed point theorems and constrained optimization. Rather than simply offer a collection of problem-solving techniques, the book emphasizes the unifying mathematical principles that underlie economics. Features include an extended presentation of separation theorems and their applications, an account of constraint qualification in constrained optimization, and an introduction to monotone comparative statics. These topics are developed by way of more than 800 exercises. The book is designed to be used as a graduate text, a resource for self-study, and a reference for the professional economist.

Mastering the basic concepts of mathematics is the key to understanding other subjects such as Economics, Finance, Statistics, and Accounting. Mathematics for Finance, Business and Economics is written informally for easy comprehension. Unlike traditional textbooks it provides a combination of explanations, exploration and real-life applications of major concepts. Mathematics for Finance, Business and Economics discusses elementary mathematical operations, linear and non-linear functions and equations, differentiation and optimization, economic functions, summation, percentages and interest, arithmetic and geometric series, present and future values of annuities, matrices and Markov chains. Aided by the discussion of real-world problems and solutions, students across the business and economics disciplines will find this textbook perfect for gaining an understanding of a core plank of their studies.

This book shows how mathematics is used in developing economic theory and in applied economic analysis. The text gradually develops the mathematical skills needed by students and allows them to progress at their own pace. A wide variety of examples shows how, and why, the application of mathematics has become essential to economists.

Contains papers that appeal to a broad and global readership in all fields of economics.

Poitras (finance, Simon Fraser University) provides an account of the early development of financial economics and presents a foundation for the study of modern financial economics. The book chronicles the development of early financial economics, from the appearance of the first printed commercial arithmetic in 1478 to the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The origins of the subject are traced back to the commercial arithmetic of the Renaissance reckoning schools. The contributions of de Moivre, Halley, and Stevin are also discussed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

A concise, accessible introduction to maths for economics with lots of practical applications to help students learn in context.

"The Treviso Arithmetic, or Arte dell'Abbaco, is an anonymous textbook in commercial arithmetic written in vernacular Venetian and published in Treviso, Italy in 1478. The Treviso Arithmetic is the earliest known printed mathematics book in the West, and one of the first printed European textbooks dealing with a science. The Treviso Arithmetic is a practical book intended for self study and for use in Venetian trade. It is written in vernacular Venetian and communicated knowledge to a large population. It helped to end the monopoly on mathematical knowledge and gave important information to the middle class. It was not written for a large audience, but was intended to teach mathematics of everyday currency. The Treviso became one of the first mathematics books written for the expansion of human knowledge. It provided an opportunity for the common person, rather than only a privileged few, to learn the art of computation. The Treviso Arithmetic provided an early example of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system computational algorithms."--Wikipedia.