Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Volume 15, Issue 2, May 2018

In this issue (.pdf):

Do ghastly images much reduce smoking? A study published in Tobacco Control reports large impact from mandated graphic warning labels—pictures of disease, suffering, and death—on cigarette packages in Canada. Trinidad Beleche, Nellie Lew, Rosemarie Summers, and J. Laron Kirby raise empirical challenges and suggest that the reported impact is greatly exaggerated.

Colonial Maryland’s bills of credit: Fiat money, discounted securities, or something else? In Economic History Review, James Celia and Farley Grubb argue that the dollar-denominated bills of credit circulated at less than face value like discounted securities. Ron Michener offers evidence that they circulated at par with specie and were treated as interchangeable with specie dollars. Farley Grubb replies, disputing Michener’s reading of the evidence.

Another path: Patricia Saenz-Armstrong describes the history and current standing of liberalism in Peru, extending the Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country series to 18 articles.

Dissing TMS: After Adam Smith died in 1790, The Theory of Moral Sentiments soon came to be disparaged and disregarded, and was largely forsaken all the way up to the late 1970s. Compiled here are quotations from 26 critics of TMS. The long train of ‘dissing’ is striking in light of our warm regard for TMS today. But have the criticisms ever been answered?

Esoteric instruction: Republished here by permission of University of Chicago Press is a chapter from Arthur Melzer’s landmark work Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. The chapter explains pedagogical esotericism, in which the author sparks the superior reader to work to find things beyond the exoteric.

EJW Audio:

Patricia Saenz-Armstrong on Economic Liberalism in Peru

Dan Sutter on U.S. Department of Energy Propaganda

Call for papers

EJW fosters open exchange. We welcome proposals and submissions of diverse viewpoints. EJW also welcomes ‘journal watch’ submissions beyond Econ.

Download entire May 2018 issue (.pdf)

Table of contents (.pdf) with links to articles