Two Dutch economists from the University of Twente and the British Kingston University have deciphered a famous economic model from the eighteenth century. Generations of scientists concluded that François Quesney's 'Tableau Economique' (also known as 'the zigzag') is wrong, but Prof. Dr. Bert Steenge and Dr. Richard van den Berg now prove the opposite.
Steenge and Van den Berg provide the evidence in the first week of July during a conference in Istanbul and in the scientific journal ‘Journal of the History of Economic Thought’ that will be released soon. What researchers at MIT, among others, failed to achieve in the 1950s and Karl Marx in the 19th century, Steenge and Van den Berg managed to achieve.
François Quesnay, a respected thinker, economist and physician in his day, wanted to show around 1760 that France was falling behind England by means of a calculation scheme designed by himself, the “Tableau économique”. It had a wonderful and completely unique shape (see attachment), and was known as the “zigzag”.
Everyone agreed that Quesnay was right and that things were not going well for France. The question, however, was whether his method was also correct, and whether it indeed proved that things went wrong. Quesnay's contemporaries did not understand his method. Karl Marx, three quarters of a century later, has not come to terms with it either.
After World War II, the problem resurfaced among economists in the context of questions of the efficiency of capitalism and communism. In that context, attempts were made to translate the old scheme into contemporary methods. That was a problem in itself. It wasn't until 1955 that someone from MIT in Boston came up with a transcription that has become very famous. He concluded that the scheme was wrong, and later researchers came to the same conclusion. A library has since been written about it, but the conclusions have remained more or less the same.
'That conclusion, that the approach was not good, has always surprised me,' says Professor Bert Steenge of the University of Twente. Quesnay was an extremely careful researcher, as well as an able physician, personal physician to Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's chief courtesan. I have spent many hours on the problem. It came down to fitting certain numbers into a 3 × 3 square with given edge totals, so a kind of magic square.'
Steenge was also initially unable to figure it out, until he met Dr. Richard van den Berg, a Dutch economic historian at Kingston University in England, at a conference. Steenge:‘He worked in London and had his PhD on old French thinkers. Together we then went through the ancient texts, and we discovered that all the interpreters had not read a certain passage correctly. For me that meant that with that knowledge I could reproduce the old numbers in terms of contemporary methods. The conclusion was clear:the old French master of more than two centuries ago was right, and all the commentators after that have been wrong.”
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