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....

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...

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...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the “marginal revolution” of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the “classical” economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists – especially Jevons and Walras –...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

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...

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...