While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his...

The moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the author Mary Shelley (1798-1851) are studied in different spheres of the academy, for rather different purposes, with no supposed reason for dialogue. We claim in a close concurrent reading, however, that Smith and...

The western is a cultural phenomenon of the U.S., but the genealogy of its ideology—aristocratic honor, courage, and justice—extends back to ages of conquest and stories of heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Odysseus. Audiences in the infancy of the western craved an idealism taken from the...