We criticize an American Economic Review article that presents itself as a theory of design innovation and fashion cycles. Scrutinizing the model and surrounding prose, we suggest that the article does not make clear what it is that it purports to explain, and that the story of the model fails...

Administrators at many universities are using the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) measures of departmental performance to assess the performance of their economics departments. The NRC methodology measures faculty publications, citations, and grants in specific ways, which...

In Catholic theology, sin is a rebellion against God and against our created nature. It is an alienation of the person from his own nature whose symptoms are rebellious passions and weakened reason. This alienation is not addressed by most economic analyses of choice, even analyses that address...

The knowledge (if any) afforded by Religion comes by the practice of faith, hope, and charity. It is direct, experiential knowledge of God. The knowledge (if any) afforded by Science comes by the method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ applied to our observations of Nature. Improved theory...

The key assumption of economic anthropology—maximizing behavior by the individual (or Max U)—has been subject to criticism both from outside and within economics. This article suggests that the philosophical or theological approach known as “personalism” may be useful in generating an...

Thomas Aquinas can serve as a resource for conceptions of human happiness and practical reason that resist the flatness characteristic of Max U. While Aquinas shares with economists the notion that humans act in order to achieve desirable ends, and that their desire is infinite, he differs from...

This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

Mainstream economists are currently under fire because they did not foresee the financial meltdown of 2007. This article suggests that many of the shortcomings of neoclassical economics come from its overly narrow understanding of the human person. Economists could turn to the higher discipline...

Is economics unduly flat? Perhaps, sometimes. But part of the power of economics comes from the parsimony of its approach to human nature. If and when we search for more complex approaches, we will need to understand the tradeoffs involved in choosing between that power and simplicity and the...

I trace the arc of my thinking about political economy and Christian theology from my early interactions with the work of Richard Whately and Frank Knight to more recent economic and theological reflections on innovation. The general theme is that life is more than economics, despite the...