A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey. We collected information on the respondents’ membership in twelve professional economic associations. Five are general professional associations (American, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Econometric), and seven are...

This piece is a prologue to a symposium, cosponsored by the Acton Institute, that asks its contributors: Does professional economics need enrichment by religious or quasi-religious thinking? Many common criticisms of professional economics propose the incorporation of richer concepts and...

In the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually no economist favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some...

In this issue, in lieu of the Comments section, the journal features the symposium: Trailblazers Too Lighty Mentioned? The symposium consists of three articles, but others might extend the symposium in an upcoming issue. The articles speak of eminent economists advancing lines of thinking...

We have created an online questionnaire that queries the respondent about whether the policy of pre-market of approval of drugs and devices has behind it any market-failure rationale. The questionnaire interactively interviews the respondent, making a virtual conversation. The point of the...

We investigate the websites of economists at Harvard University and George Mason University. We draw a contrast between the two departments by using Robert Nelson’s distinction between the “scholastic†and the “pietistic†approaches to knowledge and discourse....

At first blush, Thaler and Sunstein seem to be proposing that voluntarily helping people to overcome or cope with their rash, ignorant, impulsive selves be called “libertarian paternalism.†Such semantics would only cause confusion and introduce new terminology for things already well...

Aristotle said, “Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.†Perhaps ten percent of economists in the United States have characters similar to those of Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase,...