Many argue that income mobility is declining. This applies to all types of income mobility (relative and absolute; intergenerational and intragenerational). As remedies, those who worry and others who want to improve mobility tend to propose expansions to welfare programmes. We argue that...

A market economy can nurture good human attributesIn the thirtieth IEA Discussion Paper, Philip Booth examines the moral limits to the market economy. Christians often express concerns about the way in which self interest in the market economy can become disordered or bent and thus manifest...

Modern welfare states undermine human flourishingIn the thirty-first IEA Discussion Paper, Professor Philip Booth explains how modern welfare states and high levels of public debt undermine human flourishing. His arguments are presented in the context of Catholic social teaching.Professor Booth...

Postliberalism has emerged as an influential ideology, especially on the political right. Its leading figures include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the U.S. and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the U.K. Postliberals claim that liberalism has caused the woes of the contemporary West. They...

Deirdre McCloskey's work on bourgeois virtues is pathbreaking, but it has relatively little to say about working class virtues. The present paper turns to John Stuart Mill (a McCloskey favorite) for his take on the "future of the laboring classes" (Mill [1848] 1965, 758 – 796). If modern...

It is our natural inclination to find stable patterns and meaning in the chaotic world around us. This assists in our efforts to understand the past and forecast the future. The starting point of this essay is the phrase "dismal science" which is an often used 'epitheton ornans' of economics....

Wie selbstverständlich geht die heutige ökonomische Standardlehre davon aus, dass sie Studierenden eine feste und unveränderliche Sicht auf die Welt vermitteln kann. Doch woher kommt diese Annahme? Walter Lippmann, einer der Begründer des Neoliberalismus, gibt hierauf einen ersten Hinweis:...

Current literature on John Stuart Mill's writings about Asia has mainly focused on his influence in India because of Mill's 35-year career in the East India Company. Scholars in both China and the West have not paid attention to Mill's views on China. This paper delves into Mill's notion of...

The role of first principles in economics is examined through the lens of dominant methodological approaches of the classical and neoclassical periods. First principles are most clearly displayed in pure deductive systems. The tension between first principles as the basis for deductivist...

Marx is dead. But so is Hayek. With neoliberalism crumbling, Europeans are beginning to wonder what it is that is really wrong with the current European Union. The paper proposes the following answer: To this day, European integration has not been a process of emancipation. This shortcoming,...