Category Archives: Uncategorized

Act I: Balliol College, Oxford (1744) [*] Adam Smith was enrolled in Balliol College at Oxford University from July 1740 until August 1746. During his Oxford years, the young scholar wrote to his mother on several occasions.[1] Although most of … Continue reading →

By my count, the word “absurd” appears 36 times in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but for me the most memorable use of this word is when Smith refers to “the absurd prescriptions” of doctors in Book II, Chapter 3 … Continue reading →

Starting tomorrow (16 Sep), I will begin sharing the details of two new scholarly projects that I have been working on these past few weeks. One of my projects explores Adam Smith’s own personal experiences with doctors and the health … Continue reading →

The Public Database of World Predictions (hat tip: Alex Tabarrok) A computational framework for evaluating an edge-integrated, multi-ramp construction model of the Great Pyramid of Giza (via Nature) AI extinction resignation sparks false-flag conspiracy claims (via The Telegraph) Game Theory … Continue reading →

Check out this post by ‘Air Genius’ Gary Leff: “Terrorists Attacked Our Freedoms on 9/11–Then Washington Spent 25 Years Taking More of Them Away“. Today, air-travel passengers in the U.S. are less safe (see here, for example) AND less free … Continue reading →

My most recent paper “Adam Smith in the City of Light” (with Alain Alcouffe) was recently published in volume 15 of the Adam Smith Review. (Here is a link to an ungated preprint of my paper.)

One (“The Social Reckoning“) is about Mark Zuckerberg’s response to a Wall Street Journal investigative report known as the Facebook files; the other (“You Can See Everything“) is about disgraced Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes. The theatrical release … Continue reading →

File under: the history they did not teach me in school. The Stono Rebellion (also known as “Cato’s Conspiracy”) begins on this day (9 September) in 1739 in the colony of South Carolina. It is the largest and most violent … Continue reading →