In The Darwin Economy a distinguished behavioral economist, Robert Frank, promises to put Adam Smith's “invisible hand narrative” into “context”. Neglecting history, empirical evidence, original sources, and a voluminous secondary literature, he fails to deliver. Frank predicts that one...

The search is on for low cost collaborative learning models that foster creative cooperation and growth through spontaneous competition. I propose that a traditional renga competition for stakes can fulfill several of those goals at once. “Capitalistic Crisis,” composed by five undergraduate...

The almshouse dominated the thinking about poverty and the poor during America's period of industrialization and its greatest economic downturns. Yet economists had surprisingly little to say about the facts of almshouse demography, and what they have written has been a rather bad fiction when...

After William Gosset (1876-1937), the 'Student' of Student's t, the best statisticians have distinguished economic (or agronomic or psychological or medical) significance from merely statistical 'significance' at conventional levels. A singular exception among the best was Ronald A. Fisher, who...

Abraham Lincoln was a co-op dude. He had a hip neck beard, sure. Everyone knows that. But few have bothered to notice that the first Republican President of the United States was an economic democrat who put labor above capital. Labor is prior to and independent of capital, Lincoln believed, and...

Over the past decade randomized field experiments have gained prominence in the toolbox of economics and policy making. Yet randomization enthusiasts have paid little attention to the ethical issues, economic costs, and theoretical difficulties caused by the so called randomization principle....

This comment was published in the International Journal of Forecasting symposium on the Soyer-Hogarth experiment (Vol. 28, No. 3, July/Sept. 2012, pp. 712-714). The experiment evaluates the ability of expert econometricians to make predictions based on commonly provided regression output. Visual...