"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the...

A proposal that the notion of specificity--the idea that factors of production are not interchangeable--can provide a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from the transactional environment and microeconomic restructuring.