First edition, first printing. 8vo. [14], 128 pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (paper stock evenly browned but otherwise internally clean and unmarked; jacket edge worn with some minor chipping to tips of spine and corners, spine panel just a shade faded, small portion of loss to middle of spine panel, notwithstanding a very good example of the rare dust jacket). Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University of Press, Harvard Economy Study Number Eighty-Seven, 1949.
The rare first book by the Harvard economist James S. Duesenberry (1918-2009), described by Kenneth Arrow as ‘one of the most significant contributions of the postwar period to our understanding of economic behavior’, being the published version of his doctoral thesis on consumer behaviour in which he made an important contribution to Keynesian economics with the introduction of the Relative Income Hypothesis, paving the way for later developments by Milton Friedman and Franco Modigliani.
