This article is a reflection on the question of whether economists have a tendency to become more classical liberal as they age. It was written in my “overseer role” on a project led by Daniel Klein on the ideological migration of the 71 individuals awarded the Nobel Prize in economic...

The project “The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates” fills the September 2013 issue of Econ Journal Watch. The project provides profiles of each of the 71 individuals who, from 1969 through 2012, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel....

Why is there no Milton Friedman today? The new structure of things—or lack of structure—makes it hard for someone to emerge as a focal representative of classical liberalism. But every day, innumerable souls breathe new vitality into the cogent perspective that Friedman and others gave to...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book†feature provides a new and exciting tool for bibliometric research. Over the last few years, a growing number of books listed on Amazon. com reference Schumpeter in some way. As of May 3, 2007, Amazon listed 8,086 books that in some way...

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...

In many works Deirdre McCloskey criticizes professional economics for too readily representing man as a maximizing agent—Mr. Maximum Utility, or Max U. McCloskey says that economic activities are not the machinations of robots or mathematical functions, but rather affairs among human beings....