Articulate knowledge entails the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Information is the reading of the facts through a working interpretation. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by discoursing as though interpretation were symmetric and final. This move has the effect...

This brief research memo collects quotations from David Hume's works about reason as a passion — specifically, a calm passion. The collection shows that after A Treatise of Human Nature, which Hume disavowed, the dichotomy between reason and passion pretty much falls away, and, instead, reason...

The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden, but the volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer (Timbro, 2017) translates choice works and presents Geijer to modern readers. In this essay we provide an introduction to Geijer (pronounced...

We conducted a survey by mail in 2013 of randomly selected economics professors in the United States about the welfare effects of three proposed policy reforms. We received back 574 completed surveys (a 19 percent response rate). A large majority supported a reform to increase immigration into...

Reputation is possible in a small community, but in the Smith-Lippman-Hayekian Great Society people are mainly strangers. I model credit reporting as a system of formalized and surgically-precise gossip. In the Great Society credit reporting makes possible reputations, which make possible credit...