We examine, with the tools of economics, a fundamental tenet of some of the most recent theoretical work in sociology, which we refer to as the Postmodernist Critique : preferences are socially constructed, firms exploit their monopoly power through advertising in order to create new (false)...

In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation...