We investigate possible explanations for the rhetorical gap that divides producers and influential consumers of economic knowledge, academic economists and policymakers, respectively. We argue that economics lacks a developed theory of how academic research influences political decision making....

A review essay on Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. xii-720.

The term "social Darwinism" owes its currency and many of its connotations to Richard Hofstadter's influential Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (SDAT). The post-SDAT meanings of "social Darwinism" are the product of an unresolved Whiggish tension in SDAT: Hofstadter championed...

American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers-whom they labeled "unemployables,""parasites," and the "industrial...

Can a rational choice modeling framework help broaden our understanding of anorexia nervosa? This question is interesting because anorexia nervosa is a serious health concern, and because of the following issue: could a rational choice approach shed useful light on a condition which appears to...

Why do people diet? The proximate cause of dieting is a desire to lose weight, but, because there are different ways by which a person becomes heavier than he wants to be, the ultimate causes of the choice to diet vary. Using a simple, graphical model grounded in the physiology of weight...