The purpose of this paper is to give a principled answer to the question of under what conditions measures of happiness or life satisfaction, understood as subjectively experienced mental states, can serve as proxies for well-being. According to a widely held view, measures of happiness and life...

Methodological individualism, coupled with radical subjectivity, leads naturally to skepticism regarding the objective theoretical value of economic aggregates. I restate the role of aggregates in the methodological individualist paradigm, focusing on the Austrian tradition, in a way consistent...

One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William...

There is a rich complexity to actual human beings that cannot be captured in totality by any specialized academic discipline because all disciplines, in the process of specialization, focus only on narrow aspects of what it means to be human. Economics takes this reductive approach further. For...

The interest-rate controversies between Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher have attracted little attention and, in the opinion of most commentators, justifiably so. Böhm-Bawerk and Fisher argue over what appear to be two minor issues – Böhm-Bawerk's claims that his third cause of interest (productivity...

This article discusses the problem of "thought experiments" in Austrian economics and takes as a starting point Lawrence Moss’ argument on the divide between the older Austrian economists - for whom thought experiments were crucial - and the new generation that, in Moss’ view, has...

Standard macro theories reflect a choice-theoretic orientation wherein aggregate variables are treated as acting directly on one another. Macro phenomena are thus reduced to the same order of simplicity as micro phenomena; macro variables differ from micro variables only by their larger size. In...

The logic of economic inquiry requires two distinct research programs. One program treats economic life in terms of invariant formal categories across time and place. The other program treats the continual of novelty and turbulence through time through human interaction. These programs are not...

In this paper I argue that the current core of macroeconomics - by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach - has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the...

The rise of subjective measures of well-being represents at least two important trends in the measurement of welfare or well-being. The first trend, which has already received some attention in the literature, is a shift away from preference-satisfaction accounts of individual well-being and...