This paper uses economic reasoning to analyze the traditions and institutions of one of the most successful criminal organizations in modern history: La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Drawing on recently declassified FBI reports, the paper's analysis shows that LCN's core institutions are best understood as...

Martin Pánek asked me to write a Foreword to a new edition of a Czech translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He gave me permission to post my original English-language text here. The book will be published by the Liberální Institut, edited by Pavel Chalupníček,...

We explore the conjecture, first hinted at by Peter Minowitz, that Smith deliberately placed his central idea, as represented by the phrase “led by an invisible hand,” at the physical center of his masterworks. The four most significant points developed are as follows: (1) The physical...

Unintended consequences entail the attainment of ends not originally envisioned when a person decides to pursue a particular course of action; the employment of particular means, expected to produce a certain desired consequence, actually produces different or additional consequences not...

We have been asked to examine the individualism-holism dichotomy within economics. We pursue this examination by probing the contours of several dichotomies that recur throughout the resulting debates over method. The primary dichotomy concerns whether society is properly an analytical object...

A long-standing item of interest in Canadian economic history is the “agricultural crisis” that apparently plagued the large colony of Quebec during the first half of the nineteenth century. One particularly resilient explanation of the crisis claims that cultural conservatism made the...

Social life can take on a variety of forms – some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can...

Most people regard inequalities as more acceptable when they reflect differences in effort, rather than differences in luck. In practice however, effort and luck are often intertwined. We study redistributive behavior in a situation where it is common knowledge that luck completely determines...

We stand at a critical juncture in U.S. foreign policy. The challenges facing the United States and the world are unique, myriad, and perpetual. We provide a playbook for the national-security elites for how to efficiently run wars. This playbook is intended only for the political elites. Great...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...