Dating back to the period of Louis the XV in France, the surgeon Francois Quesnay formulated the Tableau Economique (also known as the zig-zag) to explain the phenomena of economic growth and decline.
Steenge and co-author van den Berg sifted through the literature of pre-revolutionary France, dating back some 250 years, to discover that Quesnay's formulations can still be of significant value to contemporary society. The discussion about `productive and unproductive activities' is reopened for debate.
Steenge says, `we can do the calculations employing Quesnay's concepts and using modern mathematics.'
Despite the valiant efforts of many economists since Quesnay, such as the likes of Karl Marx, Russian-American Wasily Leontief and the American Almarin Phillips, the questions surrounding the Tableau Economique were left unanswered.
According to Steenge, `Leontief's methodology can be used to model Quesnay's `ideal state,' but not the `dynamics' involved.'
Most recently however, with the missing pieces of the Tableau Economique recently unearthed, the theory of Phillips, which is a combination of the theories of Quesnay and of Wassily Leontief's `input-output model,' appears to be in part incorrect. One consequence may be a revitaliztion of the debate about the alternatives in organizing an economy. Steenge views his research efforts, in part, as the `rehabilitation of an old scholar.'
The beauty of such research according to Steenge is that: `all writers and thinkers of modern economics, whether they be dead or alive, become part of the dialogue.' He adds, `Doing this research, well, in a sense it's a long love story...to examine elements of an earlier debate.'
