How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under...

Deirdre McCloskey challenges economists to take talk seriously. Public choice economics, like most economics, typically assigns only a small role to various forms of talk between individuals. By contrast, throughout Richard Wagner’s oeuvre, there is an undercurrent of talk about talk. This...