CV/Resume
Books
Econ Journal
Watch
Lost Language, Lost Liberalism
Academia Survey of Policy Views
Papers etc. by Dan Klein and collaborators
- In Praise of Adam Smith's Organon and Smithian Allegory
- Video: Theory of Moral Sentiments—Getting Started
- Sacred Beliefs "R" Us
- Come Together in Adam Smith
- The Man within the Breast, the Supreme Impartial Spectator, and Other Impartial Spectators in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Adam Smith's Non-foundationalism
- Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative Justice in Adam Smith
- Instilling Duties above Instilling Rights: Two Features of Adam Smith's Talk of Justice and Liberty
- Hume and Smith on Utility, Agreeableness, Propriety, and Moral Approval
- Three Frank Questions to Discipline Your Theorizing
- Ought as an Is: On the Positive-Normative Distinction
- Are So-Called Normative Statements Practically the Same as Suitably Formulated So-Called Positive Statements? Evidence from a Survey of Economics Professors
- Against 'Pure Theory'
- Language, Discourse, and Ostension: Selected Passages
- Adam Smith and Propriety in Moral and Political Discourse
- Think Spiral: The Divided Brain and Classical Liberalism
Papers on coordination, invisible hand, Adam Smith, David Hume:
- Is It Just to Pursue Honest Income?
- Concatenate Coordination and Mutual Coordination
- (accompanying Excel file)
- Unfolding the Allegory behind Market Communication and Social Error and Correction
- Convention, Social Order, and the Two Coordinations
- Israel Kirzner on Coordination and Discovery
- Planning and the Two Coordinations, With Illustration in Urban Transit
- In Adam Smith's Invisible Hands: Comment on Gavin Kennedy
- In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle: The Invisible Hand in Smith's Tomes
- The Regularity of Irregularity in Adam Smith's Three Invisible Hands
- Elements That Expose to Contempt
- Adam Smith's Rebuke of the Slave Trade, 1759
- Adam Smith and Human Resources: The Moral Challenges of Modern Society (and in Swedish)
- The Music of Social Intercourse: Synchrony in Adam Smith
- (accompanying Excel file)
- Smith's Attitude toward Rousseau
- YouTube: Smith on Rousseau
- Think Spiral: Essays on Adam Smith: Introduction
- Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Twenty-Six Critics, from 1765 to 1949
- TMS's Appeal Moves with Openness to Non-foundationalism: 35 Critics, from 1765 to 1949
- The Circumstantiality of Bivariate Relationships in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Adam Smith on Reputation, Commutative Justice, and Defamation Laws
- Of Its Own Accord: Adam Smith on the Export-Import Bank
- Glimpses of Adam Smith: Excerpts from the Biography by Ian Simpson Ross
- Glimpses of David Hume
- Convention without Convening: Hume's Marvelous Innovation
- Mere-Liberty in David Hume
- Jural Pluralism and Jural Integration in David Hume's History of England: A Compendium of 142 Quotes
- Adam Smith's Unmerited Censure: An Esoteric Reading of a 1764 Pamphlet on Slavery
- Raillery of Adam Smith: Praise-by-Blame in a 1764 Pamphlet on Slavery
- Adam Smith, David Hume, Liberalism, and Esotericism: Introduction
- Link to the project page with 14 JEBO papers
- 21 Prompts to Reading Adam Smith between the Lines
- YouTube: Smith's Supposed Anti-esotericism
- Even Homer Nods: My Line-edits to The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Presenting Adam Smith's Unified Writings: Paratextual Cues in Wealth of Nations
- Gratefulness and Resentfulness: A Virtuous Asymmetry
- Related podcast on gratefulness, resentfulness, and the atavism thesis
Short Papers for the General Reader
- Rinkonomics: A Window on Spontaneous Order (and in Spanish)
- Propriety in Adam Smith -Part 1
- Propriety in Adam Smith -Part 2
- Benevolence, Beneficence, and Beneficialness
- Allegory and Political Economy: Communication and Cooperation
- Grateful to Whom, or What?
- What's Natural about Adam Smith's Natural Liberty?
- Nature, Convention, and Natural Convention
- McCloskey's Narrative and Jurisprudence
- Allegory and Political Economy: A Reply to Gavin Kennedy
- TMS II.iii on the Influence of Fortune in a Nutshell (scroll to comment 55)
- Smith's gendering of amiable and respectable
- Adam Smith on Self-Deceit
- Corruption according to Adam Smith
- Related Youtube: 16 min
- Smith's allegory and organon: Attractive aspects
- Open Letter on Adam Smith
- Adam Smith presumption-of-liberty passages
- Oren Cass Balderdash on Adam Smith
- On Amartya Sen on Adam Smith(blog post)
- Cancel Culture Stalks Adam Smtih
- David Hume on Ancient Revolutions
- The Hume-Rousseau Affair
- Hume exchange at Liberty Matters:
- Hume and Liberty, Simple and Complicated
- Presumptions and Default Positions
- Hume as Non-foundationalist
- Operose Machines 'R' Us
- Hume Really Did Make Mere-Liberty Central
- Some Bearings in the Hume Literature
- Some More Mere-Liberty Moments in Hume's History, Part 1
- Some More Mere-Liberty Moments in Hume's History, Part 2
- Dangers of Mere-Liberty
- Blog post about the forum: Liberty in David Hume: A Controversy
Videos and podcasts
- Youtube: Who is Adam Smith's 'impartial spectator'? (slidedeck) (the two TMS quotations)
- Youtube: Interview on Adam Smith (11 min)
- Podcast on knowledge, coordination, and allegory
- Podcast on the two coordinations and the people's romance
- Podcast on TMS (2019)
- Theory of Moral Sentiments book club
- Video: Adam Smith:An Overview of His Ethical Vision (47 min)
- Youtube: Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation (30 min)
- Youtube: How Adam Smith and Other Scots Originated a Political Meaning for "Liberal" and Launched Liberalism (main presentation is the first 38 min)
- YouTube: ASI event on Adam Smith, Jimena Hurtado, Craig Smith, Eamonn Butler and me
- Youtube: Left Smithianism (42 min), PPT slidedeck
Articulate knowledge entails information, interpretation, and judgment. Discovery of opportunity:
- Knowledge Flat-talk: A Conceit of Supposed Experts and a Seduction to All
- Discovery Factors of Economic Freedom: Respondence, Epiphany, and Serendipity
- Discovery and the Deepself
- Experiment on Entrepreneurial Discovery: An Attempt to Demonstrate the Conjecture of Hayek and Kirzner
- Salute to Schelling: Keeping It Human
- Quality-and-Safety Assurance: How Voluntary Processes Remedy Their Own Shortcomings
- Asymmetric Interpretations
- The Improprieties of the Pretense of Knowledge
- Glossary to Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation
Short Papers for the General Reader
Video
Papers on how private, voluntary practices and institutions achieve assurance and trust:
- The Demand for and Supply of Assurance (and in Swedish)
- Quality and Safety Assurance: How Voluntary Social Processes Remedy Their Own Shortcomings
- Credit Information Reporting: Why Free Speech is Vital to Social Accountability and Consumer Opportunity
- Good Conduct in a Great Society: Adam Smith and the Role of Reputation
- Was Occupational Licensing Good for Minorities? A Critique of Marc Law and Mindy Marks
Short Papers for the General Reader
YouTube video
Writings on the FDA:
- Colleagues, Where Is The Market Failure? Economists on the FDA
- Do Off-Label Drug Practices Argue Against FDA Efficacy Requirements? A Critical Analysis of Physicians' Argumentation for Initial Efficacy Requirements
- Who Certifies Off-Label?
- Drug Approval Denationalization
- A Simple Way to Speed Drug Approvals
- The Right Direction for the FDA
- Youtube: Conversation on FDA with Ramon Epstein
- 305 Economists Called to Answer Questionnaire on the Pre-Market Approval of Drugs and Devices
YouTube videos
Technical game-theory paper on credit reporting and reputation:
Liberty, liberalism, libertarianism: Affirmations and analysis:
- Conservative Liberalism: Hume, Smith, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives
- Video: Liberalism 1.0: The Genealogy of Adam Smith's Liberalism
- A Call to Embrace Jural Dualism
- Video: What Is Liberalism? (Debate with Helena Rosenblatt at Timbro, PPT file)
- Video: Debate with Helena, for Fraser Institute
- Podcast: Helena, me, Aaron Powell, Jason Kuznicki -- What is Liberalism?
- Youtube: A Plea Regarding "Liberal" (29 min)
- Youtube: The Semantic History of Liberalism (20 min)
- Youtube: Niche Libertarianism: A Critique (38 min) Slides (pdf) (Related Timbro FB video)
- Youtube: Ten Thousand Commandments: Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments as an Esoteric Critque of Interventionism (46 min) (PPT file here)
- Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard
- Direct and Overall Liberty: Areas and Extent of Disagreement
- Direct and Overall Liberty: Replies to Walter Block and Claudia Williamson
- Youtube: Five Uses for the Distinction between Direct and Overall Liberty (46 min)
- Youtube: Esotericism and Liberalism 1.0
- Liberty, Dignity and Responsibility: The Moral Triad of a Good Society
- Liberty between the Lines in a Statist and Modernist Age: Unfolding the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek
- Economics and the Distinction between Voluntary and Coercive Action
- Meanings of Liberty: Aron, Constant, Berlin
- The Recovery of Liberty
- Property: A Bundle of Rights?
- Assume the Positional: Comment on Robert Frank
- Book review of Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty
- The Ways of John Gray
- Critique of Thaler/Sunstein "Libertarian Paternalism"
- Conservative Magazines and the Presumption of Liberty: A Content Analysis on Sex, Gambling, and Drugs
- Lost Language, Lost Liberalism (4L)
- A Plea Regarding "Liberal"
- Team Republican: A review essay of Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto
- George Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft: Selected Passages
- Liberalism and Allegory: A Tragedy
- The Warm Liberalism of Erik Gustaf Geijer
- From a Raft in the Currents of Liberal Economics
- Karl Mittermaier's Pursuit of Classical Liberal Coherence
- Symposium on Greg Collins's book on Edmund Burke
- The Semantic Revolution
Short Papers for the General Reader
- Meanings of Liberty: Aron, Constant, Berlin (with exchanges with Helena R. and Dan M.)
- Classical liberal > Libertarian? (Swedish variant: Libertarianismen
- Podcast with Helena Rosenblatt about the meanings of "liberty"
- Libertarianism and Classical Liberalism: A Short Introduction
- Libertarianism -- encyclopedia entry
- The Origin of "Liberalism"
- Do-It-Yourself Liberal Ngrams
- A Better Understanding of Justice
Beyond Commutative But Not 'Social' Justice- Sentiment, Passive and Active, and Liberalism
- Book review of Holmes and Sunstein, The Cost of Rights
- Book review of Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians
- Economical Cogitations
- Book review of Szasz, Our Right to Drugs
- Book review of Ronald Hamowy The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek
- 14 Bull__t Tactics used against Libertarians
- Tocqueville's Gumptious American
- Tocqueville's Hope
- Age 21 to Smoke: What Would Tocqueville Say?
- Libertarianism as Communitarianism
- The Moral Consequences of Paternalism
- Crusade Against Drugs Is Testing Our Sensibilities
- The Fatal Conceit Revisited
- Virtual Barbed Wire
- What Should Liberals Liberalize?
- Dreamt Trump on Free Speech
- The Libertarian Party Reduces Liberty (2019 follow-up)
- Youtube: Mere Libertarianism (25 min)
- Video: Challenging, Bargaining, and Royalty: An Analysis of Libertarian Argumentation (36 min)
- Youtube: Jeffrey Tucker interviews me on "liberal" (38 min)
- Collins's Burke
- In Italian: Interview regarding Liberalism 1.0
- 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Call Leftists "Liberal"
- Sweden a Leader in Classical Liberalism
- Christianity → Liberalism: Siedentop reading group
- Liberalism Unrelinquished
Covid-19:
- Sweden's Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World's
- The Underpinnings of Sweden's Permissive COVID Regime
- Stockholm City's Elderly Care and Covid19: Interview with Barbro Karlsson
- 16 Possible Factors for Sweden's High Covid Death Rate among the Nordics
- COVID19 and Rinkonomics
- Covid-19 and Conservative Liberalism
- Herd Immunity Is Misleading (and a French translation)
- Masks in Sweden
- Masks in Sweden: A Followup
- Give Sweden a B- in Coronavirus 101
- A Second Wave at Your Doorstep?
- Municipality Second Waves: Zero and Counting
- Human Challenge Trials Are the Free Market
- Darth Sidious's Lockdown
- The Make 'Em Miserable Hypothesis
- YouTube: Our CV19 Catastrophe Impulses: The Sublime and the Not So Beautiful, PPT file
- When Diktats and Conscience Conflict
Diagnosing statism:
- The People's Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do)
- A Demand for Encompassment: A Hayekian Experimental Parable about Political Psychology
- Against Overlordship
- Cultural Trends as Seen in Ngrams: Karl Polanyi with a Hayekian Twist
- Cohesionism
- From Weight Watchers to State Watchers: Towards a Narrative of Liberalism (A review essay of Alan Kahan Mind Vs. Money)
- Why Do Government Officials Believe in the Goodness of Bad Policy?
- Left Out: A Critique of Paul Krugman Based on a Comprehensive Account of His New York Times Columns, 1997 through 2006
- Conservative Magazines and the Presumption of Liberty: A Content Analysis on Sex, Gambling, and Drugs
- Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning: Conservatism and Leftism
- Youtube: Politics in School in Sweden (13 min)
- 43 Timely Quotes by Edmund Burke
- FDR versus Liberalism: Quotations from David Green, 1987
- The Bad and the Very Bad: Pondering Alexis de Tocqueville's Dystopias
- Podcast: The Left Pole
Papers on current transportation issues:
- How to Franchise Highways
- Curb Rights: Eliciting Competition and Entrepreneurship in Urban Transit
- High Occupancy/Toll Lanes: Phasing in Congestion Pricing a Lane at a Time
- Fencing the Airshed: Using Remote Sensing to Police Auto Emissions
- Free Parking Versus Free Markets
Short Papers for the General Reader
Papers on the private toll road companies of 19th century America:
- The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods? The Turnpike Companies of Early America
- Economy, Community and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797-1845
- Responding to Relative Decline: The Plank Road Boom of Antebellum New York
- Use, Esteem, and Profit in Voluntary Provision: Toll Roads in California, 1850-1902
- Plank Road Fever in Antebellum America: New York State Origins
- From Trunk to Branch: Toll Roads in New York, 1800-1860
- Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Nineteenth Century Americ
- America's Toll Roads Heritage: The Achievements of Private Initiative in the 19th Century
Short Papers for the General Reader
Papers on the economics profession:
- What Do Economists Contribute?: Introduction
- A Plea to Economists Who Favour Liberty: Assist the Everyman [a symposium]
- Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don't Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other? [a symposium]
- Video of event, joined by Don Boudreaux, Scott Sumner, and Jeremy Rabkin
- Institutional Ties of Journal of Economic Development Authors and Editors
- The PhD Circle in Academic Economics
- Sense and Sensibilities: Myrdal’s Plea for Self-Disclosure and Some Disclosures About AEA Members
- The Forsaken-Liberty Syndrome: Looking at Published Judgments to Say Whether Economists Reach a Conclusion
- A Little More Liberty:What the JEL Omits in Its Account of What the Economic Report of the President Omits
- Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members
- Economists' Policy Views and Voting
- Model Building versus Theorizing: The Paucity of Theory in the Journal of Economics Theory
- Reasons for Supporting the Minimum Wage: Asking Signatories of the 'Raise the Minimum Wage' Statement
- Economist Petitions: Ideology Revealed
- Economics Professors' Favorite Economic Thinkers, Journals, and Blogs (along with Party and Policy Views)
- Characteristics of the Members of Twelve Economic Associations: Voting, Policy Views, and Favorite Economists
- Most Economists Welcome Ideological Openness, a Survey Indicates
- Economics Professors' Voting, Policy Views, Favorite Economists, and Frequent Lack of Consensus
- The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates
- Why Weren't Left Economists More Opposed and More Vocal on the Export-Import Bank?
- Results of a Survey of Economics Professors on Immigration, Drug, and Pharmaceutical Policies
Short Papers for the General Reader
- The Smith-Hayek Economist: From Character to Identity
- Who Is the Practitioner of Political Economy?
- Economists' Misplaced Faith in an Invisible Hand
- Ideology Revealed in Economist Petitions
- An Amazing Consensus Among Economists: Not
- Krugman Falsehood about 1985-2007 Consensus against Fiscal Policy
- Where Right, Left and Center Agree
Papers on academia
- Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists
- Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law and Psychology
- Partisan Faculty Affiliations in All Disciplines: A Voter-Registration Study
- The Social Science Citation Index: A Black Box--with an Ideological Bias?
- Sociology and Classical Liberalism
- Liberal versus Conservative Stinks (a reply to Zipp and Fenwick)
- Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid -- This piece adapts groupthink theory to the setting of academia. Focusing especially on the micro mechanism of majoritarian departmental politics and the more macro cultural mechanism of the disciplinary pyramid, it offers a theory of how a bad worldview, once it reached a tipping point, could tend toward domination of the academic discipline and get locked-in. It was written for the 2009 AEI volume The Politically Correct University and reprinted in The Independent Review.
- YouTube lecture: Groupthink in Academia.
- By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors, in the 2009 AEI volume The Politically Correct University. The paper reviews all the data up to 2008 about professoriate ideology.
- Intellectual Hazard: A Liberal Selection of Quotations
- Embarrassed as a Non-Left Professor?
- Review of Rothman, Woessner, and Kelly-Woessner book
Audio on academia
- Podcast with Russ Roberts on groupthink in academia
- Podcast with Stephen Gibson on groupthink in academia
- Public Radio interview (also featuring Bruce Smith)
Short Papers for the General Reader
Technical papers on commitment and time consistency:
- Commitment and Time Consistency: A Game-Theoretic Discussion
- A Game-Theoretic Rendering of Promises and Threats
- The Microfoundations of Rules vs. Discretion
- Time Consistency and Related Concepts [highly technical]
- Contingent
Plans, Time Consistency and Paretian Rulers [highly technical]
Miscellaneous papers:
- Deductive Economic Methodology in the French Enlightenment: Condillac and Destutt de Tracy
- The Half-life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues
- In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds: A Few Quotations from Michael Polanyi's The Study of Man
- I Was Wrong, and So Are You
- Toward a Public and Professional Identity for Our Economics
- The Joys of Yiddish and Economics
- Sweden, Summer 1959: A Remebrance from the United States
- Civility and Civil Courage
- On Jordan Peterson, Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing
- WalkAway: Observational Data on 150 Erstwhile Democrats
- The 'Trade Deficit': Defective Language, Deficient Thinking
- Dina Barn Blir Indoktrinerade i Skolan
- Roget.org and Other Sites to Bookmark
- CS Lewis and the Way Forward
- The Abolition of Man
- 3 Libertarian Essays
Elaborate lecture handouts/Notes/Videos
- Occupational Licensing (ppt)
- The Demand for and Supply of Assurance (slidedeck, pdf)
- School Vouchers (ppt)
- Urban Transit (ppt)
- Mere Libertarianism (ppt)
- Challenging, Bargaining, and Royalty: An Analysis of Libertarian Argumentation (ppt)
- Video (36 min)
- Concatenate Coordination and Mutual Coordination (ppt)
- Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative Justice in Adam Smith (ppt) Justices paragraph (pdf) Justices table (pdf)
- Unfolding the Allegory behind Market Communication and Social Error and Correction (ppt)
- Allegory and Political Economy (ppt)
- Liberalism 1.0 (ppt)
- David Hume Liberal Political Theory (ppt)
- You Are a Soul
- Podcast: A Better Understanding of Justice
- Geijer as Moral Philosopher (ppt)
- Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation (the text of a speech)
- The Origins of the Use of "Liberal" in a Political Sense of the Term: William Robertson and Adam Smith (ppt)
- Liberal Remarks on the "Austrian" Identity and Project (the text of an opening statement)
- Band-man: Red on the Inside (ppt)
- Virtues Project for a Youngster
- Presentation on the Swedish School System (ppt)
- Liberal Anti-Imperialism
- What Did Karl Polanyi Mean by "the great transformation"?
- Critique of Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter
- Bryan Caplan and Adam Smith on Surprise
- Apprehensions over Designer Babies (Bryan Caplan's reply here; David Henderson here)
- Vocabulary aphorism
- Presuppositions/falsifiability/ analyticity posts
- Polysemes in Hume and Smith
- A Milton Friedman on the Horizon? (blog post)
- David Hume on Reason as a Passion
- Francis Hutcheson Speaks to Veganism (blog post)
- Theistic Evolution and Atavism Explanations (blog post)
- Remarks on American Sniper
- Little Pink House: Best Classical Liberal Movie Ever?
- On the Queen biopic
- Youtube: Gad Saad chat (54min)
- Video: Correspondence between the Two Goods
- Video: Virtue
- Video: Virtue Palave
- Video: Justness of Honest Income
- Video: Social Justice and Adam Smith
- Podcast on Tocqueville's Gumptious American
- Sweden to the Political Left of the Whole USA?
- Interviewed, on Michael Covel's podcast
- Ryan Reeves YouTube Channel on Religion, Theology, History
- Fred Foldvary: A Joyous Friend
- Beach Boys Grateful
- Back in the USSR
- EuroVision 2019
- Joker: Some Thoughts
- Star Wars:
