ABSTRACT
The causes of poverty are a theme that occupied Knut Wicksell for virtually all of his adult life. It was the theme for the speech and the publication that made him a well-known or, rather, notorious public figure in Sweden in 1880, and it was also the theme of two of his last publications: one published in 1925 (Wicksell, 1925), the other, posthumously, just after his death in 1926 (Wicksell, 1926a). It can hardly be doubted that his passion in this matter was one of the factors that made the student of mathematics take an interest in questions related to the social sciences and which pulled Wicksell away from the natural sciences into the study of economics.
