Market failures, which are usually viewed as a consequence of self-interest, are also supposed to be a major justification for coercive state interventions. This was the view of, among others, Richard Musgrave and Paul Samuelson, but not of James Buchanan. The latter certainly admitted that individuals are self-interested, that markets fail to allocate resources efficiently, but did not believe in the need for coercion. In this paper, we show that, to Buchanan, coercion can be unnecessary if certain post-constitutional conditions are satisfied. We show that he believed that self-interested individuals voluntarily adopt pro-social behavior in small groups. Small groups or small numbers represent a post-constitutional alternative to the veil of ignorance.

James Mill’s account of the decision process is part of his theory of the human mind, which in turn is the cornerstone of his theory of education. Mill believed the end of education was to produce happiness, and that this happiness required action by the individual. A problem, as Mill saw it, was that intemperance might interfere with the decision process, causing individuals to take actions that do not promote their greatest happiness. This paper provides an interpretation of this process from a formal perspective, in the light of Mill’s view on intemperance.

This paper focuses on the teachings and admonitions regarding wisdom found in the sixth edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). Following a mind-path marked by the seminal contributions of Glenn Morrow (1923), Donald Winch (1978), and Laurence Dickey (1986), the paper offers an interpretation of the higher moral standard (superior prudence) introduced by Smith in the last edition of TMS, as his response to the socio-economic and cultural changes that took place in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Between the first and last editions of TMS the taste for luxury and conspicuous consumption became widespread and contagious both geographically and across ranks. Prudence and other-approbation, sufficient gatekeepers of moral conduct and character in the previous editions of TMS, became progressively less effective in keeping society away from moral deception and in regulating reputation and the distinction of ranks. The paper examines the introduction of superior prudence in the last edition of TMS as Smith’s vision of a dialectical process between external and internal approbation that is capable of transforming individual dependence on social praise into a dialogue between materialistic and moral concerns, which would lead to a progressively wiser, although conflictual, existence.

This paper explores John Commons’s views toward Jews in order to assess whether his published writings contain assertions that today would be stigmatized as anti-Semitic. The evidence we provide shows that Commons’s racial characterization of Jews was framed within a broad and indiscriminate xenophobic framework. With other leading Progressive Era social scientists, in fact, Commons shared the idea that the new immigration from eastern and southern Europe would increase competition in the labor market, drive down wages, and lead Anglo-Saxon men and women to have fewer children, since they would not want them to compete with those who survive on less. Within this general xenophobic context, Commons developed assertions regarding immigrant Jews that show traces of explicit anti-Semitic accusations.

Tjalling C. Koopmans, research director of the Cowles Foundation of Research in Economics, was the first US economist after World War II who, in the summer of 1965, travelled to the Soviet Union for an official visit to the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Koopmans left hoping to learn from the Soviet economists’ experience with applying linear programming to economic planning. Would his own theories, as discovered independently by Leonid V. Kantorovich, help increase allocative efficiency in a socialist economy? Inspired by a vague notion of universal reason spanning the iron curtain, Koopmans may have even envisioned a research community that transcends the political divide. Yet, he came home having discovered that learning about Soviet mathematical economists might be more interesting than learning from them. On top of that, he found the Soviet scene caught in the same deplorable situation he knew all too well from home: that mathematicians are the better economists. Reconstructing Koopmans’s voyage from a first-person perspective puts the spirit of universal economic knowledge at Cowles to test: Is it capable of establishing a dialogue across the political divide of the Cold War or is it limited to the Western academic cocoon?

Milton Friedman (1968)—his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association—contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper’s crucial argument. That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift the Phillips curve. It is suggested that the fact of this mistake and of its having gone all but unnoticed are points of historical interest. Further reflections, drawing on the arguments of Forder (2014), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth, are suggested.