Articulate knowledge entails the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Information is the reading of the facts through a working interpretation. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by discoursing as though interpretation were symmetric and final. This move has the effect...

This brief research memo collects quotations from David Hume's works about reason as a passion — specifically, a calm passion. The collection shows that after A Treatise of Human Nature, which Hume disavowed, the dichotomy between reason and passion pretty much falls away, and, instead, reason...

Adam Smith's moral theory considered a number of sources of moral approval and at each turn he invoked an accompanying spectator, however sketchy. In judging an action, at each turn we consult our sympathy with a spectator that is natural or proper to the occasion. In this paper I suggest that...

This piece is the Prologue to an _Econ Journal Watch_ symposium entitled, _Property: A Bundle of Rights?_ This Prologue was written to prompt the invited scholars to expound their own criticisms of the bundle-of-rights view, or, as the case may be, to address criticisms out there. The Prologue...

One aspect of the present paper is to draw out the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek. I suggest that common economic talk of market communication, market error and correction, and policy error and correction invokes a spectatorial being and appeals to our sympathy with such being. Behind such common...

One’s ideological views – that is, the pattern of positions one tends to take on important public-policy issues – run deep and change little. Inevitably they involve commitments and judgments about the most important things. Just as we value disclosure of vested interests, we value...

This piece shows conclusively that in the 1770s Adam Smith and others christened their political persuasion ‘liberal’ by affixing a political meaning to the word 'liberal'. Liberalism 1.0 was indeed Smithian liberalism. The bodies of evidence: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769...

Should economists remain as detached scholars, pursuing their research to the satisfaction of themselves and fellow academics? Or should they try to educate their fellow men and women in economic ideas, hoping to have an impact on economic policy? In this paper, Professor Daniel B. Klein...

Aristotle said, “Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.†Perhaps ten percent of economists in the United States have characters similar to those of Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase,...

An entrepreneur named Ken Kam has transcended the conventional interpretations of how to go about picking mutual-fund stock pickers. Compared to the S&P500, his mutual fund has been delivering significantly better returns with a significantly better "beta." His discovery is not aptly described...