In this issue, in lieu of the Comments section, the journal features the symposium: Trailblazers Too Lighty Mentioned? The symposium consists of three articles, but others might extend the symposium in an upcoming issue. The articles speak of eminent economists advancing lines of thinking...

We have created an online questionnaire that queries the respondent about whether the policy of pre-market of approval of drugs and devices has behind it any market-failure rationale. The questionnaire interactively interviews the respondent, making a virtual conversation. The point of the...

It seems like a small and perhaps shrinking minority of economists know reverence of individual figures. Most economists seem to be without heroes, and sometimes disparage reverence as cultish idolatry. Here I collect from Michael Polanyi’s The Study of Man (1959) a few passages that...

We report on 35 US-based economist petitions from 1994 to 2009, featuring 10,792 signatures and 6,030 signatories. We separate the 35 petitions into three categories: 15 liberty-augmenting (or liberal) petitions, 13 liberty-reducing (or interventionist) petitions, and 7 in a category called...

We investigate the websites of economists at Harvard University and George Mason University. We draw a contrast between the two departments by using Robert Nelson’s distinction between the “scholastic†and the “pietistic†approaches to knowledge and discourse....

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...

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,...

THERE ARE SERIOUS FLAWS IN WOLFGANG PESENDORFER’S (2004) Reply to our Comment on his article “Design Innovations and Fashion Cycles†(1995). Here we address several flaws in Pesendorfer’s Reply and expand our Comment’s critique of his 1995 model.