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One of the most significant episodes in recent history is the rapid economic growth of East Asian nations in the late twentieth century. Considered alongside Japan and China, the four [...]

While defeat in a war is a military event, the recognition of the defeat is a political act. The timing of the political recognition ... is only partly determined by [...]

I suggest that two features of Adam Smith's talk of justice and liberty reflect a priority on instilling duties, as opposed to instilling rights. The first feature has to do [...]

Last year marked the centenary of the publication of Frank Knight's magnum opus, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, which entails important and still neglected insights from a comparative economic point of [...]

The Indeterminacy of Neoclassical Value Theory At mid-twentieth century, the neoclassical mathematical theory of value culminated in Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu's (1954) model, which characterizes the static general equilibrium [...]

For many years, P. T. Bauer (1915-2002) was the 'dissenter on development.' Among other dissents, he demonstrated that foreign aid was ineffective. Today that view is held in higher regard [...]

Deirdre McCloskey is an optimist, and rightfully so, when it comes to the development potential of poor countries. As she notes, the impressive records of India, China, and other countries [...]

Gordon Tullock states that there are three motives for income transfers: 'the desire to receive transfers, charity, and envy' (1997, 6). The motive behind the vast majority of government redistribution, [...]

Thinking was Gordon Tullock's main interest in life. He let his thinking roam widely and creatively over his many fields of interest; moreover, Tullock is widely recognized for the robust [...]

In reading George Borjas's lead essay in this issue of The Independent Review and his recent book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative (2016), it is impossible to escape [...]

MAN IS BORN AN ANIMAL and animal he remains--unless or until his spiritual or creative nature is awakened. Until then he remains a creature, a mere beggar of life prepossessed [...]

War has been the only means of really improving employment that is respectable. --John Maynard Keynes, Keynes's Lectures Peace and not war is the father of all things... Peace builds, [...]

In the 2001-02 academic year, when Richard Vedder was beginning his work on the causes and consequences of rising costs in higher education, the average cost of a single year [...]

Over the past decade, Richard Vedder has become widely known in academic, policy, and media circles for his work on productivity in higher education. In fact, however, Vedder (1996, 2000; [...]

Richard Vedder's contributions to academic scholarship over the decades span many subdisciplines in economics. Many of his earlier works focused on various issues in state and local government finance. In [...]

In their 1991 paper in Public Choice, 'The War between the Rent Seekers,' Richard Vedder and Lowell Callaway develop and test a unique theory about the interactions between the levels [...]

In an overview of his book with Lowell Gallaway, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, Richard Vedder (1993: 1) states: 'Not only has the government contributed to [...]

Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State (2013) vigorously argues that industrial policy, rather than market forces, is the key factor in fostering innovation. For Mazzucato, the RM Phillips Professor in the [...]

James M. Buchanan was a contractarian. I am not. (1) But I share Buchanan's classical-liberal ideals. (2) In my account of what I regard as Buchanan's classical-liberal views, I start [...]

We learned many things from Jim Buchanan. Among the more important is that titles should be felicitous. Ours here is ambitious, perhaps presumptuous, even slightly mischievous (as we shall shortly [...]

Objectivity ... is now conceived as inter-subjectivity. Inter-subjective norms are not agreed to by the members of a society because they are objective, but, in effect, become objective because they [...]

Introduction In this article I will discuss Mises' famous argument concerning economic calculation under socialism. I will point out that there are in fact two components of this argument. The [...]

Counterfeiting is, and should be, a crime. It involves theft by deception, and the stealing of goods or other valuables using false claims to money. But what about counterfeiting money that is already counterfeit? In Block's interpretation, such an action amounts to seizing stolen goods from a thief. Counterfeiting simply relieves the original counterfeiter of his ill gotten gains and is therefore not theft itself. The present article offers a critique of this thesis of Block's on the basis that counterfeiting money involves the theft of property from innocent people.

There has been considerable debate within the social sciences about the consequences of rapid population growth. The law of population, as described by Thomas Robert Malthus, asserts that population growth is ultimately limited by the means of subsistence, and therefore preventive checks on population growth (e.g., voluntarily limiting the number of births) are necessary to avoid the grim prospect of inevitable human suffering when the means of subsistence cannot support the population. Economists, demographers, and other social scientists have produced volumes of exegesis on Malthus's work. This article assesses how representative economists of the Austrian School have interacted with Malthus's law of population.

The problem of scarcity is often talked about, but it is rarely clearly defined. In this article, two different views of scarcity are outlined: absolute and relative scarcity. These two are respectively exemplified by Malthus's and Robbins's views of scarcity. However, both of these views tend to naturalize and universalize scarcity, and thus overlook abundance and sufficiency, which are important states in the social provisioning process. It is argued that this is due to ignorance of the sociocultural causal underpinnings of scarcity, abundance, and sufficiency (SAS). The introduction of these mechanisms enables further conceptual differentiation of SAS (e.g., quasi-, artificial-, natural-).

The term social justice comes up frequently in circles concerned with political and economic policy. Although it is often ill defined, it generally rests on two overriding principles. First, social [...]

The global economy is battling financial crisis and recession on an unprecedented scale. Reisman's book Democracy and Exchange reviews the contributions of a number of thinkers including Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter to the task of making ordinary people feel tolerably happy with the outcomes that affect their lives. The article argues that although Smith is viewed as the principal figure in the Scottish political economy tradition, there are other writers, notably John Rae whose ideas may have more contemporary relevance than those of Smith. A return to the ideas of Rae and Schumpeter, particularly on fiscal policy, may provide important insights into the financial crisis. Keywords: fiscal policy; John Rae; Scottish political economy tradition., Introduction Reisman's distinguished academic career has been built on a series of books in which he has analysed and interpreted the thought of such leading economists, sociologists and politicians as [...]

It is well known how in his later years, Alfred Marshall became less enamored with equilibrium methods of reasoning in economics and advocated instead the study of [evolutionary] biology. Some have alleged that Marshall's change of heart is what led him to abandon the project of preparing the second volume of his Principles of Economics. In this paper I deny that it was Marshall's commitment to evolutionary biology that held back volume 2. Rather, it may have been his stubborn commitment to a particular variant of evolutionary biology (that is, Spencer's version of evolutionary biology) that blinded him to the way a more far reaching synthesis of Darwinian and equilibrium notions might have been accomplished. The application of the modern biological synthesis might have enriched some of Marshall's earlier equilibrium notions such as the 'representative firm'. RESUME. Il est bien connu que, dans ses vieux jours, Alfred Marshall devint moins amourache des methodes de raisonnement de l'equilibre en economique et preconisait a la place l'etude de la biologie (evolutionniste). Certains ont allegue que c'est ce changement de noyau qui a conduit Marshall a abandonner son projet de preparation d'un second volume de ses Principes. Cet article denie que ce soit son engagement dans la biologie evolutionniste qui empecha le volume 2. Il se pourrait bien plutot que ce soit son engagement tetu dans une variante particuliere de la biologie evolutionniste (c'est-a-dire, la version de Spencer) qui lui ait bouche la voie d'une synthese de plus longue portee entre les notions de l'equilibre et de Darwin. L'application de la synthese biologique moderne aurait pu enrichir certaines des notions de l'equilibre initial de Marshall telles que celle de 'firme representative'.

Whately is a difficult thinker, partly because he is competent in so many disciplines. Joseph Schumpeter, who straggled with Whatley's 'elusive' greatness, saw a systematic core in Whately: the force behind Nassau Senior's axiomatics. Whately's contemporaries did not talk of axiomatics, but they did point out that his work depended upon an unusually small number of authorities, that is, Aristotle, Bacon, and Smith. In our interpretation, these foundational sources gave Whately three guiding principles to characterize all human activity: innate sociability, innate self-love, and costly mental activity. Self-love includes a desire to know and a desire to share knowledge. These principles, coupled with a normative principle of fairness, constitute the basis for his science of reciprocal exchange, or catallactics. Violations of fairness motivate his multidimensional reform proposals. For Whately, fairness requires transparency, and the demands of transparency for tractions is literally Gospel.

This paper is a part of an attempt to develop an economic philosophy of ontology based on the Continental tradition of hermeneutics. Ontology explores the meanings of entities as the objects of knowledge to posit the orientation of knowledge. Heidegger developed hermeneutical ontology, focusing on the self-understanding of Dasein (human beings), which consists of the 'projection' of its possibilities into the future and the 'thrownness' of it into the restrictions by the past history. Dealing explicitly with the pre-structure of knowledge, hermeneutics opens the perspective of knowledge much broader than permitted by the analytical tradition of philosophy. It is the contention of this paper that Schumpeter from the Austrian subjectivist circle could cope with this approach in social science by the use of the concepts of 'innovation and tradition' or 'creation and routine.' The paper discusses the relationship between Heidegger and Schumpeter on various philosophical issues and derives what might be called the Heidegger = Schumpeter theses.

An analysis of Thomas Schelling's work entitled 'Strategy of Conflict' is provided. It is believed that Schelling played an important role in stimulating the development of non-cooperative game theory by focusing on the critical importance of information and commitment in strategic dynamics. An analysis of economics' place in the social sciences is also presented.

Sandra Peart and David Levy in The 'Vanity of the Philosopher' champion a concept of 'analytical egalitarianism.' Equality is a difficult concept. Peart and Levy attempt to reconstruct analytical egalitarianism from the classical writing of British political economy from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. Aspects of this reconstruction touch on a number of different egalitarian conceptions, including: (1) equality of capacity and talent, (2) racial equality, (3) equality in the marketplace, (4) equality of opportunity, (5) equality of material conditions, (6) equality of happiness, (7) equality before God, and (8) political equality. This paper briefly considers the relation of each of these equalities to Peart and Levy's analytical egalitarianism. The hope is that such exercises can help elucidate Peart and Levy's reinterpretation of classical economic's understanding of equality. A central theme does emerge. Peart and Levy, echoing the classical economists themselves, seem reluctant to follow their radical assumptions concerning talent and capacity for happiness to radical conclusions concerning the appropriate provenance of redistributional policies.

At the onset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes made some startlingly optimistic predictions about the economic possibilities his grandchildren might face a century later. Within the next 100 years, Keynes proclaimed, technological progress would solve the economic problem facing human beings, individuals would devote themselves to noneconomic pursuits instead, and no one would continue to strive for relative goods. Was Keynes right? This article examines each of Keynes's three main prophecies and concludes that, even though over 75 years have transpired since they were made, and even though they were founded in part on the belief held by most classical economists in the value of technological progress and economic growth, not one of Keynes's predictions has been realized.

Ideas that influenced David Ricardo's proposal of eliminating the use of precious metals as money are discussed in relation to the application of the rational expectations equilibrium to come up with intelligent macroeconomic policies. Details on common beliefs assumption in modern macroeconomics are also presented.

It is argued that effectuation may not and should not be based on Davidsonian inter-subjectivity but rather on Penrosean inter-subjectivity. A team- or network-based extension of Ludwig Lachmann's individual-based radical subjectivism could be provided by Penrosean inter-subjectivity. This direction would allow scholars to avoid 'ontological oscillation'.

A different interpretation from Chiles et al's work on how Ludwig Lachmann's concept of how effectuation works is presented. It is also argued that there are crucial differences that draw upon recent developments in our understanding of how the human mind works and that there are at least three areas of possible conceptual confusion.

The ferocity of Knight's comments on Henry George may come as a surprise to those who are not familiar with his criticisms of other economists and philosophers. But, in fact, his criticisms of George are not due to specifically Knightian insights on George's approach, but rather reflect the different philosophical framework from which neoclassical economists like Knight think. At the core of Knight's disagreements with George is his neoclassical theory of rent, as the Georgist critics of Knight understand. The article reviews the philosophical, economic, and ethical ideas that underlay Knight's neoclassicism, and hence inform his criticism of George.

Twelve political criticisms of George were paramount after he formed his own political party in 1887: (1) his refusal to join with other reformers to link his proposals with theirs, or to absorb theirs into his own campaign; (2) his singular focus on ground rent to the exclusion of other forms of monopoly income, such as that of the railroads, oil and mining trusts; (3) his almost unconditional support of capital, even against labor; (4) his economic individualism rejecting a strong role for government; (5) his opposition to public ownership or subsidy of basic infrastructure; (6) his refusal to acknowledge interest-bearing debt as the twin form of rentier income alongside ground rent; (7) the scant emphasis he placed on urban land and owner-occupied land; (8) his endorsement of the Democratic Party's free-trade platform; (9) his rejection of an academic platform to elaborate rent theory; (10) the narrowness of his theorizing beyond the land question; (11) the alliance of his followers with the right wing of the political spectrum; and (12) the hope that full taxation of ground rent could be achieved gradually rather than requiring a radical confrontation involving a struggle over control of government.

The review of the book 'Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation' written by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried is presented.

The review of the book 'Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market' written by Richard Layard, Stephen Nickell and Richard Jackman is presented. The future trends of economic research are discussed.