Modern economics is filled with models using simultaneous equations to explain economic behavior. One common model, the circular flow diagram, is found in many principles-level textbooks, and is offered as the basic way in which economies function. The entrepreneur, if included at all, is...

This essay is a commented bibliographic inventory of the references in the economic thought concerning the affection and the family, from Adam Smith to the authors that recently have formalized models toward this subject. Within the commented authors are: Smith, Malthus, Sade, Fourier, J.S....

Carl Menger published his classic work Principles of Economics in 1871, that work is the founding text of what came known as the “Austrian School of Economics”. That label has now been used to describe a historical school of thought, as well as contemporary academic economists and public...

Ronald Coase (1910-2013), who sadly died at the remarkable age of 102, made significant contributions to economics based on common sense and the detailed study of his topics. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance...

In 1982 my book Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century was published. At the 2017 History of Economics society meeting, a session was held to mark the 35th anniversary of that event. Papers by Wade Hands, Kevin Hoover, Tony Lawson, and the trio Peter Boettke, Solomon...

The historical forerunners of contemporary austerity are still largely unexplored. This essay considers the "liberal phase" of Fascist Italy (1922-1925) as a case study to explain austerity as a full-blown rationality, that is intrinsically, and simultaneously, theory and practice, encompassing...

Drawing inspiration from Ross Emmett's (2006) imaginative construction of what Frank Knight might have thought about the Stigler-Becker formulation of Die Gustibus, I ask what Arthur Lovejoy (1936) might have thought about the origin of public choice. He would surely have denied that public...

Once economics came to be understood as the scientific investigation of the operation of markets, economic theorists pushed ethical and metaphysical concerns outside their realm of study. After the separation, the claims of Christian theology had no more jurisdiction over the discipline of...

Western economic thinkers in the 19th century rediscovered the principle of greatest happiness (PGH). However, as Eastern philosophical and religious thinking shows it was part of common knowledge in Buddhism and Hinduism over the past millennia. PGH did not have the same agenda as later on...