In the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually no economist favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors, presumably random, responded to our survey which asked favorites in the following areas: Economic thinkers (pre-twentieth century, twentieth century now deceased, living age 60 or older, living under age 60), economics journals, and economics blogs....

One year ago, we reported the results of a 2008 Zogby survey that purported to gauge economic enlightenment (Buturovic and Klein 2010). Our main result was that college education bore little relationship to economic enlightenment. We also found that that self-identified Progressives and Liberals...

The project “The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates” fills the September 2013 issue of Econ Journal Watch. The project provides profiles of each of the 71 individuals who, from 1969 through 2012, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel....

Imagine that someone with all the endowments of a Milton Friedman were born in the 1960s or 1970s. Is it conceivable that such a person would develop into a Milton Friedman like we know the actual Milton Friedman to have been, including his academic eminence and his eloquent and influential...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey. We collected information on the respondents’ membership in twelve professional economic associations. Five are general professional associations (American, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Econometric), and seven are...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey. This paper reports on their views on 17 policy issues. We relate attitude toward liberalization to political-party voting. Abortion and occupational licensing are among the questions novel to the survey. We also look at...

This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

At first blush, Thaler and Sunstein seem to be proposing that voluntarily helping people to overcome or cope with their rash, ignorant, impulsive selves be called “libertarian paternalism.†Such semantics would only cause confusion and introduce new terminology for things already well...

Adam Smith doubted an invisible hand in academia, saying that academia was prone to clubbish foolishness. From economics-department webpages, I collected data on Ph.D. origination of economics faculty. Using a ranking of 200 economics departments world-wide, I find that at the top departments...