Previous articles have sought to demonstrate that markets fail in the shaping of preferences. With no recognized property rights in an agent’s preferences, they are too seldom changed for the better (as judged by the agent) and too often changed for the worse. This paper addresses the question...

“Symbolic consumption” is formally unrelated to “second-order preferences”, but the ability to symbolically consume and the ability to have preferences about one's preferences are each uniquely human characteristics. The major question addressed in this paper is this: are symbolic...

The century-long decline in the amount of time spent working for income has been reversed over the last twenty-five years. By one account, this reversal is primarily traceable to a rise in the power fo employers who find more work hours per employee to be in their interest. By another account,...

In this paper the "two-selves" models of self-imposed constraints are shown to carry normative implications only when the present-self acts to restrict the freedom of a future-self whose ability to act rationally has been clearly compromised. Conversely, when this future-self, if unrestrained,...

Experiences as a student of psychology and economics led me to question the second-class status of the non-testable. Attention to ‘being’ was insignificant relative to attention given to ‘doing’. Religion and philosophy seemed better suited to capture the internal struggle over one’s...

The conventional argument to explain how taxes distort points out that the relative mix of private goods is altered by taxes. This argument breaks down, however, when it is recognized that a lump-sum alters the relative mix of goods as long as goods differ their income elasticities. This paper...