We investigate possible explanations for the rhetorical gap that divides producers and influential consumers of economic knowledge, academic economists and policymakers, respectively. We argue that economics lacks a developed theory of how academic research influences political decision making....

American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers-whom they labeled "unemployables,""parasites," and the "industrial...

This essay explores the progressive beliefs other than human hierarchy that inclined Progressive Era economic reform toward eugenics. It argues the following: that the progressives believed in a powerful, centralized state, conceiving of government as the best means for promoting the social good...

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But...