Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...

A review essay of Roman Frydman & Michael D. Goldberg's Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State.

The paper is a keynote lecture from the Tilburg-Madrid Conference on Hypothesis Tests: Foundations and Applications at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Madrid, Spain, 15-16 December 2011. It addresses the role of tests of statistical hypotheses (specification tests) in...

The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek's epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek's own so- called "epistemic turn." The thesis defended here is that Hayek's dissatisfaction with his technical economics – in...

The present paper considers the implications of the postulate that the activities of scientists constitute complex phenomena in the sense associated with the methodological writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, methodologist, and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek. Although...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

Situational analysis (also known as situational logic) was popularized by Karl Popper as an appropriate method for the interpretation of history and as a basis for a scientific social science. It seeks an objective posit ive explanation of behavior through imputing a dominant goal or motive to...

This paper analyses one of Turgot's first economic essays, Plan d'un ouvrage sur le commerce, la circulation et l'intérêt de l'argent, la richesse des états (1753-4). Written prior to the appearance of physiocratic influence, it is Turgot's contribution to the movement of writing that bubbled...

Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly a quarter of all journal articles in economics and in nearly half in macroeconomics. Surprisingly, its rise as an essential element in the vocabulary of economists can be dated only to the early 1970s. The paper traces the...

Although involved in projects of influent institutions like the Cowles Commission, the NBER, and the Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC), George Katona, the "pioneer student and chief collector of consumer anticipations data" (Tobin, 1959, p. 1) is virtually absent from accounts of the topics...