In 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...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

The efficiency of “quasimarkets”—decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition—is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement in political economy called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The...

In the 2011 Franz Cuhel Memorial Lecture, I argue that the study of endogenous rule formation in economic life (what I term the positive political economy of anarchism) should be studied in-depth and that the economic analysis of the Austrian school of economics provides many of the key...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

James M. Buchanan has argued that the primary role that the economist plays in society is a pedagogical one. The job of the economists is to teach students the principles of economics, most notably an understanding of spontaneous order and the role of the price system in generating that order...

The article argues that Ostroms’ institutionalism has a dimension that is complex and profound enough to deserve to be considered a “social theory” or a “social philosophy”. The paper pivots around the thesis that the “social philosophy” behind the Bloomington School’s research...

Supporters of basic income theories have an admirable goal. However, applying the economic way of thinking to the problem, we see that, while the goal is certainly laudable, the attempt to achieve that goal can lead to disastrous results stemming from knowledge and incentive problems faced by...

Daniel Klein (Klein 1997, Klein and Orsborn 2009 and Klein and Briggeman forthcoming) and Israel Kirzner (forthcoming) have been engaged in a debate concerning how economists should understand and use the terms “coordination” and “economic goodness”. Klein and Briggeman (forthcoming)...