In Hume's epistemology, induction leads to discovery in matters of fact. However, because of the poor data Hume analyzes the balance of trade with a thought experiment, doing what Mill makes explicit afterwards: reason from assumptions, to reach conclusions which are true in the abstract. Hume's...

The problems posed by monetary policy cannot be dealt with by legislating enduring policy rules. With the passage of time, economic understanding does not systematically converge ever more closely on a "true" model of the economy, a process which is now sufficiently far along that our current...

Mark Blaug brought his usual standards of historical awareness and respect for empirical content to bear when he wrote about the Quantity Theory of Money, but he hesitated to probe too deeply into the political and ideological elements of its history, perhaps leading him to underestimate their...

The present paper is devoted to showing that all externalist explanations for truth in economics are false, but that if there any are used, it should not be the democratic one utilized by Rosen (1997). Rather, even though it is equally fallacious, it should the one proposed in the present paper:...

This paper discusses the contrast between the near zero notice taken by Adam Smith's contemporaries of his use of the “invisible-hand” metaphor. Followed by the virtual absence of any notice of it for a just short of a century after his death in 1790 until it went “viral” following Paul...

This article reviews an English translation of "First Principles of Islamic Economics" (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2011) by Maulana Sayyid Abu'l A‘la Maududi (1903-1979), a foundational document of the field, that was published in Urdu in 1969. After a brief Introduction the selections in...

Ralph Hawtrey, one of the leading economists of the interwar period, published his first work in economics, Good and Bad Trade, in 1913. The book contains the key elements of the theoretical model developed and refined by Hawtrey over the next quarter century. Notwithstanding Pigou's judgment...

The term 'emergence' features only infrequently on the work of Friedrich Hayek, and then almost always merely as a synonym for 'spontaneous order'. The argument of this paper is that Hayek's accounts both of the working of the human mind, and also of the spontaneous order of the market, rely...

One approach to analyzing inequality is to compare average economic choices from a classical theoretical framework. Another approach considers the impact of the formation of society, through statutes and institutions, on average economic outcomes. This paper studies the effects of slavery on...

The welfare state could not function without judgments about how well off its citizens are. For example, governments devise progressive income taxes, which are designed to capture more wealth from the well off and less from the impecunious. These policies presume an ability to take a manageable...