ABSTRACT
The fact that both Muth and Mills presented the original versions of their respective approaches to expectations at the December 1959 Washington, DC meeting of the Econometric Society has been overlooked by “historians” of economic thought in general, and even by ostensibly “comprehensive observers of the history of rational expectations” itself. Indeed, the aspect of “multiple discovery” involved in the development of the rational and implicit expectations approach goes beyond the issue of “precursors”, since many observers have simply overlooked Mills’s work. One example of this has already been seen in the case of Keuzenkamp’s Economic Journal article (1991), as shown above. Another can be seen in Niehans’s book A History of Economic Theory (1990), where he explicitly states that as regards rational expectations “no multiple discovery has yet come to light” (1990: 509).
