As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, I gave up game theory for good when I rediscovered Adam Smith during the summer of 2020. As it happens, my Smithian “aha moment” was part of a larger trend in my scholarship, for I had already published a handful of legal history papers, The Pamphlet Wars: The Original Debate over Citizenship in the Insular Territories (1999), Deconstructing Darwin (2005), and Gödel’s Loophole (2014). But beginning in 2019 — the same year I wrote my last formal game theory paper — I returned to history yet again with my paper Domestic Constitutional Violence, which revisited two obscure Little Rock cases that unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the legality of President Eisenhower’s decision to send paratroopers to Arkansas to desegregate Central High School.

Then, in 2020, I published Guaranteed Minimum Income: Chronicle of a Political Death Foretold, where I retold the story of “The Family Assistance Act of 1970″, a precursor to contemporary calls for universal basic income or UBI. (Had this historic bill been enacted into law, it would have provided every poor family with children a guaranteed minimum income!) And in 2021, I wrote a paper originally titled the “The Leibniz Conspiracy” (published in 2022 as The Leibniz Conspiracy) about a little-known conspiracy theory championed by the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel.

In short, my turn to legal history may have been what primed my eventual rediscovery of Adam Smith in 2020. Stay tuned, for I will write about my newfound fascination with and scholarly interest in the life and ideas of the Scottish philosopher-economist in a future post …