Knowledge has its counterpart in action, and your actions emerge from your normative calls in personal policy-making. On those two steps I propose to bring to the traditional Hayekian knowledge problem a prism of Smithian moral analysis. This approach perhaps sheds new light on the absurdities...

Articulate knowledge entails the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Information is the reading of the facts through a working interpretation. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by discoursing as though interpretation were symmetric and final. This move has the effect...

This brief research memo collects quotations from David Hume's works about reason as a passion — specifically, a calm passion. The collection shows that after A Treatise of Human Nature, which Hume disavowed, the dichotomy between reason and passion pretty much falls away, and, instead, reason...

We conducted a survey by mail in 2013 of randomly selected economics professors in the United States about the welfare effects of three proposed policy reforms. We received back 574 completed surveys (a 19 percent response rate). A large majority supported a reform to increase immigration into...

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and...

What accounts for Sweden’s high COVID death rate among the Nordics? One factor could be Sweden’s lighter lockdown. But we suggest 15 other possible factors. Most significant are:(1) the “dry-tinder” situation in Sweden (we suggest that this factor alone accounts for 25 to 50% of Sweden's...

The appeal of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has moved with openness to non-foundationalism. This paper is devoted to providing evidence of that bivariate relationship. The paper stems from a 2018 article, “Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” I have pared down the quotations and...

Scholars distinguish between gratitude, which involves not only appreciation of benefit but a positive feeling directed to the benefactor, from gratefulness, which does not necessarily involve any benefactor, much less a feeling toward one (‘I am grateful for the warm sunshine.’). I suggest...

A group of scholars, including myself, have elaborated a tri-layered understanding of justice in Adam Smith (commutative, distributive, and estimative). Here I go beyond the matter of Smith’s understanding of justice, to ask: How did he discourse about justice? Does he instruct us in the...