Widespread use of the term "neoliberalism" is of surprisingly recent origin, dating to only the late 20 th century. The "neoliberalism" literature has nonetheless settled on an origin story that depicts the term as a self-selected moniker from the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium. This paper...

Today, Karl Marx is considered one of the preeminent social scientists of the last two centuries, and ranks among the most frequently assigned authors in university syllabi. However in Marx's time, many competing sociological traditions and socialist political movements espoused similar ideas...

Was 1986 Nobel Laureate James Buchanan an intellectual heir of South Carolina slavery apologist and political thinker John C. Calhoun? Further, was Buchanan's worldview shaped by segregationist Nashville Agrarian poet Donald Davidson? These are claims made by historian Nancy MacLean in her 2017...

Over the last thirty years state governments have paid ever-increasing attention to the results of standardized testing to identify successful schools, rewarding those with better performance by allocating to them a greater share of resources. Although traditional, high-stakes, standardized...

Scholars of John Maynard Keynes' life and contributions to economics have tended to approach his involvement in the early 20th century eugenics movement by either:(1) historicizing it as a regrettable political curiosity with only minor connections to his larger system of economic thought or,(2)...

Recent historical works, most notably 2017's Democracy in Chains, claim that 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's formative contributions to political economy were inspired in significant part by hostility to Brown v. Board of Education. This argument suggests that the research agenda of...

Long term measures of income inequality must grapple with the challenges presented by incomplete historical records. In this paper we examine one such problem affecting the quality of federal income tax return data in the period between the two World Wars, which form the basis for the widely...

Social justice, as a concept, has long been considered inimical to the classical liberal tradition (Hayek 1976; Nozick 1973; 1974). To be fair, there is much to criticize about the concept. The definitional fluidity of the term, along with its frequent deployment for “activist” political endeavors,...