During the Progressive Era, a new breed of social reformers advocated policies such as the segregation of lesser people, including entire races of people, to labor colonies in order to advance social evolution. Prominent among these Progressives was Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American...

Adam Smith’s outlook still inspires and informs modern sensibilities and argumentation. It is of interest beyond Smith aficionados whether a particular line of modern thought “fits” Smith. One important such dispute involves recent “left Smithian” writers who argue that he was more...

This article is a critical review of the picture drawn by Arild Sæther and Ib Eriksen (2014) of the economic policy and development of postwar Norway and of the influence exerted by Ragnar Frisch. Regarding the postwar economy the present article draws on a number of comprehensive studies by...

In the story of Norwegian economics, and of Norwegian economic policy and performance during the postwar years, a central place must be given to Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973). In 1969 he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in economics, together with Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994). In our view, the...

Professor Olav Bjerkholt has provided a spirited critique of our 2014 article titled “Ragnar Frisch and the Postwar Norwegian Economy.” Here we reply briefly, noting that many of the quotations he provides actually support our interpretation, that it is naïve of him to play the ideology...

William Grampp’s JPE article on Adam Smith is creative and provocative. It errs, however, by disparaging the invisible hand’s importance as a symbol of various economic processes that help societies prosper in ways that individuals neither intend nor comprehend. Four specific...

In Swedish public debate, economists have been more influential than any other category of social scientists. We examine the views of five great Swedish economists on the role of the university economist in the public arena. What did they say about scholarly objectivity and value judgements,...

Peter Bauer was a pioneer in development economics and his contributions to the field have been vindicated by the collapse of central planning. Through most of his career, however, Bauer was marginalized by the economics profession. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, economists frequently...

The costs of running a regression are falling rapidly, perhaps by 10-15 percent per year. Considerations of costs and benefits suggest that this will cause an increase in the mining ratio, that is, the ratio of the number of regressions made to the number published. An individual researcher’s...

Many public-health researchers are quick to raise charges of bias to explain away the few studies that reach politically incorrect conclusions. Claims of bias are often thrown at researchers who are funded by the industries targeted for aggressive intervention. This paper discusses whether it...