In 1903 the Italian economist Amilcare Puviani articulated a theory of fiscal illusion to promote better understanding of the course of political action. Puviani created his theory to explain the failure of political pronouncements to reflect the reality to which those pronouncements claimed to...

In this very casual paper, I reproduce results from the Google Ngram Viewer. The main thrust is to show that around 1880 governmentalization of society and culture began to set in — a great transformation, as Karl Polanyi called it. But that great transformation came as a reaction to...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...

We outline the work of James Buchanan and his influence and contributions to political economy, institutional analysis, and self-governance. In addition to pioneering the public choice movement, we argue that Buchanan’s greatest contribution to political economy was initiating the...

Public health is an oft-used illustration of market failure and of the necessity of governmental action to overcome such failure. Covid-19 is just the latest in a continuing series of claims of market failure that are alleged to require solution by politically selected experts. Without doubt,...

The present 77 page document is my set of notes used in a five-part reading group on Larry Siedentop's great book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. The document contains a link to the set of videos online

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)’s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers’ incentives are not sufficient to encourage...

This essay commemorates James M. Buchanan's life and work by reflecting on my 50 years of association with him, starting in 1963 when I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia and ending with his death in 2013. This essay does not try to add to the substantial secondary literature...

Why were the rating agencies trusted? When they became required for Federal deposit insurance their incentives for upward bias was common knowledge. The requirement was attacked by a Chicago economist, Melchior Palyi, on philosophical grounds (the expertise is excessively secret) and technical...

n the midst of the current financial crisis the economics profession has seen a monumental resurrection of Keynesian ideas. The debate, which Keynes started back in the 1930s, is being picked up again, not where it left off, but in exactly the same place it started. While Keynesian theories were...