<Para ID="Par1">Storr is a free trader in ideas, bringing back into economics meaning, long banished by behaviorist dogma. His elegant little book, though, is too kind to neo-institutionalists. The followers of Douglass North, repeating without much thought over and over, “Institutions matter,” mean to say...</para>

Smith was mainly an ethical philosopher, though he practiced what was considered for a long time after Smith an obsolete sort of ethical philosophy, known nowadays as “virtue ethics.” Since 1790 most ethical theory as practiced in departments of philosophy has derived instead from Kant or...

In his elegant book Douglas Allen claims that an improvement in the measurement of Nature made for lower transaction costs and the Industrial Revolution. His argument is a typical example of neo-institutionalism in the style of Douglass North (<CitationRef CitationID="CR14">1990</CitationRef>) and North et al. (<CitationRef CitationID="CR16">2009</CitationRef>). A fall in a wedge of...</citationref></citationref>

‘Bourgeois virtue’ is not a contradiction in terms. The age of capitalism has enormously enriched the world. But the enrichment is by no means only material. The virtues enabled capitalist development; but a bourgeois life also encouraged new versions of old virtues; and gave scope...

It is true that economics needs a theory of moral sentiments along with an account of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Economics is damaged analytically by ignoring love, or care. But love is not always nice, and is sometimes a threat to freedom.

Samuelsonian (mainstream) economics cannot even think of stepping beyond its Max U, prudence-only model. But if we are going to have an economics that works and that matters, as economists like Sen and Akerlof and Hirschman have been saying, we need to admit that people do not live by prudence...

Barbara Bergmann has a tough style of confrontation and a scientific style asking How Big Is Big. Economics would be a lot better off if it dropped Mathematical 'Proof' and Statistical 'Significance' and started simulating Barbara.