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...

The relation between micro theory and macro theory is necessarily one between the parts of something and the whole of that thing. This simple recognition entails numerous analytical complexities which contemporary macro theories do more to conceal than to reveal, mostly out of a concern with...

Armed with a set of economic theories and a desire to influence policy and improve lives, behavioral economists have developed a doctrine variously referred to as libertarian, light/soft, or asymmetric paternalism, and a series of policy proposals collectively referred to as the nudge agenda. To...

One aspect of the present paper is to draw out the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek. I suggest that common economic talk of market communication, market error and correction, and policy error and correction invokes a spectatorial being and appeals to our sympathy with such being. Behind such common...

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...

The continuing budget deficits and accumulating public debt that commonly plagues western democracies reflects a clash between two rationalities regarding human governance: one of private property and its conventions and one of common property and its procedural framework. The clashing of these...

Standard macro theories reflect a choice-theoretic orientation wherein aggregate variables are treated as acting directly on one another. Macro phenomena are thus reduced to the same order of simplicity as micro phenomena; macro variables differ from micro variables only by their larger size. In...

The logic of economic inquiry requires two distinct research programs. One program treats economic life in terms of invariant formal categories across time and place. The other program treats the continual of novelty and turbulence through time through human interaction. These programs are not...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey, which asked: “Suppose you are reading or listening to an economist, and he discloses his own ideological proclivities. Which best represents your attitude toward his doing so:” The results surprised us. Sixty-three...

Karl Mittermaier (1938-2016) was a classical liberal economist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He completed a work in 1986 titled The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand: Dogmatic and Pragmatic Views on Free Markets and the State of Economic Theory, being published in 2020 for the...