In this very casual paper, I reproduce results from the Google Ngram Viewer. The main thrust is to show that around 1880 governmentalization of society and culture began to set in — a great transformation, as Karl Polanyi called it. But that great transformation came as a reaction to...

A 2009 Journal of Law and Economics article by Marc T. Law and Mindy S. Marks suggests that during the period 1890-1950 occupational licensing did not tend to affect blacks and women adversely. The biggest problem with the paper is that a Census-reported practitioner in a licensing state is not...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...

Off-label prescribing of pharmaceuticals provides a window onto how a less-regulated drug certification system would operate because such prescribing is permitted without extensive efficacy testing by the Food and Drug Administration. The experience with off-label prescribing and the experience...

Using Schelling's analysis of mutual coordination and focal points, I interpret Smithian sympathy as sentiment coordination. When the yearning for sentiment coordination seeks, further, for it to encompass the whole social group and looks naturally to government for the focal points, we have The...

The ordinary person makes decisions everyday that are important to maintaining his health. But those decisions are familiar and routine. For new decisions, important decisions, he would usually appoint a doctor to the task. The practice of serious medicine is the province of the doctor, just as...

This article argues that two early French theorists, Condillac (1714-1780) and Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), were sophisticated deductivists in economics. The historical investigations of economic methodology recognize the deductivist tradition in classical economics and its continuation into...

If there are no restrictions on the extent to which government plans can be made contingent, then there is some Paretian government with an optimal plan that never reaches a node at which deviation from the plan would yield a Pareto improvement. (At unreached nodes deviations from the optimal...

We give rigorous game-theoretic meaning to the Stackelberg notions of time inconsistency and to the idea of commitment being of value (or sequential irrationality). Time inconsistency treats desirable deviations only along the path, whereas sequential irrationality treats deviations everywhere...

Using an N-person model, I explore the microfoundations of benevolent rules-dominant situations (of which the familiar time inconsistency models are examples). I show that under discretion the citizens confront a prisoner's dilemma, and I discuss the similar dilemmas embedded in the time...