Most of the existing research on economic history relies either solely or ultimately on calculations of material interest to explain the major events of the modern world. However, care must be taken not to rely too heavily on materialism, with its associated confidence in perfectly rational...

One of the big mistakes in modern intellectual history of the Austrian school is to jump from the reality of Mises's and Hayek's being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist to a claim that they were somehow dismissed relics of a pre-scientific age or martyrs to the causes. The reality is that Mises...

Adam Smith famously argued that increased competition in religion would result in more religious tolerance and that the benefits of competition in the marketplace would also be seen in religious instruction when many religious sects are tolerated. We use a cross-section of a maximum of 167...

Economics as a discipline has come under increasing scrutiny since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Sociologist Marion Fourcade and co-authors (2015) have challenged the arrogance of economists and pointed out the dysfunctional structure of the discipline that concentrates power and...

John Searle has argued against the viability f strong versions of artificial intelligence. His most well-known counter-example is the Chinese Room thought experiment where he stressed that syntax is not semantics. We reason by analogy to highlight previously unnoticed similarities between Searle...