Daniel B Klein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3624280 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel B Klein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel B |
| FAMILY NAME | Klein |
| SIGNATURE | KLEIN D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-7433-5391 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Liberal” as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769 – 1824
The data from text digitization show that “liberal” acquired a sustained political signification for the first time around 1769: the liberal policy principles of Adam Smith and his associates. The bodies of evidence include: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769 (with a few exceptions); (2) the blossoming from 1769 of “liberal plan,” “liberal system,” “liberal principles,” “liberal policy,” etc. ; (3) the occurrence beginning in the 177…
Adam Smith’s Unmerited Censure: Revisiting a Satirical 1764 Pamphlet on Slavery
We revisit the 1764 anonymous pamphlet An Essay In Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, from A Censure of Mr Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. With some Reflections on Slavery in General. The title page says “By an AMERICAN.” The pamphlet pretends to rebut Adam Smith for his supposed censure of American colonists as base wretches and the refuse of the jails of Europe. But Smith was referring to slave ship crews. The pa…
Convention without convening
Stockholm City's Elderly Care and Covid19: Interview with Barbro Karlsson
Think Spiral: The Divided Brain and Classical Liberalism
WalkAway: Observational Data on 150 Erstwhile Democrats
Adam Smith's 1759 Rebuke of the Slave Trade
Hume and Smith on utility, agreeableness, propriety, and moral approval
OVERVIEWWe ambitiously reexamine Smith’s moral theory in relation to Hume’s. We regard Smith's developments as glorious and important. We also see them as quite fully agreeable to Hume, as enhancement, not departure. But Smith represents matters otherwise! Why would Smith overstate disagreement with his best friend?One aspect of Smith’s enhancement, an aspect he makes very conspicuous, is that between moral approval and beneficialness (‘utility’ …
Language, Discourse, and Ostension: Selected Passages
Civility and Civil Courage: For a Society symposium on Emily Chamlee-Wright’s “Self-censorship and Associational Life in the Liberal Academy
The man within the breast, the supreme impartial spectator, and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards a…
On Jordan Peterson, Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing
The Warm Liberalism of Erik Gustaf Geijer
George Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft: Selected Passages
Adam Smith's Non-foundationalism
A demand for encompassment: A Hayekian experimental parable about political psychology
Emile Durkheim said that when all of the members of a tribe or clan come together, they can sanctify the sacred and experience a spiritual "effervescence." Friedrich Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band and that modern forms of political collectivism have, in part, been atavistic reassertions of such tendencies. Picking up on Hayek, Daniel Klein has suggested …
The Forsaken-Liberty Syndrome: Looking at Published Judgments to Say Whether Economists Reach a Conclusion
Do economists reach a conclusion on a given policy issue? One way to answer the question is to survey economists at large. Another is to look at the published judgments of economists who have gone on the record. Relative to an anonymous survey, going on the record makes for much greater accountability, and presumably more personal responsibility. I discuss 11 studies of economists' published judgments. Several of them show greater support for lib…
On the Deliberate Centrality of an Invisible Hand: Reply to Gavin Kennedy, Ryan Hanley and Craig Smith: Iea Economic Afairs
We previously showed that ‘led by an invisible hand’ was physically central in original editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. We suggested that Adam Smith did that deliberately. Three authors commented on our paper, Gavin Kennedy, Ryan Hanley and Craig Smith. In this article we reply to their comments.
Section One: Diagnosing Traditional Transit
In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds
Embarrassed as a Non-Left Professor
Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning
Do Off-Label Drug Practices Argue Against FDA Efficacy Requirements? A Critical Analysis of Physicians' Argumentation for Initial Efficacy Requirements
The amended Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act requires efficacy certification for a drug's initial uses ("on-label"), but does not require certification before physicians may prescribe the drug for subsequent uses ("off-label"). Does it make sense to require FDA efficacy certification for new drugs but not for new uses of old drugs? Using a sequential online survey, we carried on a "virtual conversation" with some 500 physicians. The survey asked whet…
Liberal Versus Conservative Stinks
Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members
People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data are broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Re…
Professors and their politics: The policy views of social scientists
Academic social scientists overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the Democratic hegemony has increased significantly since 1970. Moreover, the policy preferences of a large sample of the members of the scholarly associations in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology generally bear out conjectures about the correspondence of partisan identification with left/right ideal types; although acro…
Faculty partisan affiliations in all disciplines: A voter‐registration study
The party registration of tenure‐track faculty at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to large, public, elite schools, shows that the "one‐party campus" conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also ma…
Economy, Community, and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797-1845
Turnpikes promised a solution to the problem of bad roads, but private management of highways was a startling innovation. Some people opposed the idea of turnpikes as exemplifying two bêtes noires of the post-Revolutionary period, the "private corporation" and "aristocracy." Much of the controversy, however, was rooted in local disputes over legislative concessions to turnpike protesters. The legislature both expressed and responded to turnpike p…
Economists' policy views and voting
Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members
People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data are broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Re…
The man within the breast, the supreme impartial spectator, and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards a…
Convention, Social Order, and the Two Coordinations
On Jordan Peterson, Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing
Liberal Versus Conservative Stinks
Democrats and republicans in anthropology and sociology: How do they differ on public policy issues
Hume and Smith on utility, agreeableness, propriety, and moral approval
OVERVIEWWe ambitiously reexamine Smith’s moral theory in relation to Hume’s. We regard Smith's developments as glorious and important. We also see them as quite fully agreeable to Hume, as enhancement, not departure. But Smith represents matters otherwise! Why would Smith overstate disagreement with his best friend?One aspect of Smith’s enhancement, an aspect he makes very conspicuous, is that between moral approval and beneficialness (‘utility’ …
Adam Smith's Non-foundationalism
Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning
The Forsaken-Liberty Syndrome: Looking at Published Judgments to Say Whether Economists Reach a Conclusion
Do economists reach a conclusion on a given policy issue? One way to answer the question is to survey economists at large. Another is to look at the published judgments of economists who have gone on the record. Relative to an anonymous survey, going on the record makes for much greater accountability, and presumably more personal responsibility. I discuss 11 studies of economists' published judgments. Several of them show greater support for lib…
Responding to Relative Decline: The Plank Road Boom of Antebellum New York
From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting that the drive for bigger markets was supported by a large cross section of the population. Considerable community spirit animated the movement, indicating …
Deductive Economic Methodology in the French Enlightenment: Condillac and Destutt de Tracy
This article argues that two early French theorists, Condillac (1714-1780) and Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), were sophisticated deductivists in economics. The historical investigations of economic methodology recognize the deductivist tradition in classical economics and its continuation into the neoclassical era. The nineteenth-century leaders - Nassau Senior, J.S. Mill, and J.E. Cairnes - and the twentieth-century developers - Lionel Robbins, F…
Deductive Economic Methodology in the French Enlightenment: Condillac and Destutt de Tracy
This article argues that two early French theorists, Condillac (1714-1780) and Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), were sophisticated deductivists in economics. The historical investigations of economic methodology recognize the deductivist tradition in classical economics and its continuation into the neoclassical era. The nineteenth-century leaders - Nassau Senior, J.S. Mill, and J.E. Cairnes - and the twentieth-century developers - Lionel Robbins, F…
The microfoundations of rules vs. discretion
Economy, Community, and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797-1845
Turnpikes promised a solution to the problem of bad roads, but private management of highways was a startling innovation. Some people opposed the idea of turnpikes as exemplifying two bêtes noires of the post-Revolutionary period, the "private corporation" and "aristocracy." Much of the controversy, however, was rooted in local disputes over legislative concessions to turnpike protesters. The legislature both expressed and responded to turnpike p…
Responding to Relative Decline: The Plank Road Boom of Antebellum New York
From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting that the drive for bigger markets was supported by a large cross section of the population. Considerable community spirit animated the movement, indicating …
Convention, Social Order, and the Two Coordinations
Democrats and republicans in anthropology and sociology: How do they differ on public policy issues
Political diversity in six disciplines
Medication Error in the Care of HIV/Aids Patients: Electronic Surveillance, Confirmation, and Adverse Events
BACKGROUND: Medication error occurring during the care of HIV-infected patients may lead to treatment failure, drug toxicity, or even death. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to ascertain and confirm 5 categories of medication error in the care of HIV-infected patients. RESEARCH DESIGN: This study was a retrospective study to describe the occurrence of preventable medication error and to determine if adverse events were associated with c…
Professors and their politics: The policy views of social scientists
Academic social scientists overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the Democratic hegemony has increased significantly since 1970. Moreover, the policy preferences of a large sample of the members of the scholarly associations in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology generally bear out conjectures about the correspondence of partisan identification with left/right ideal types; although acro…
Faculty partisan affiliations in all disciplines: A voter‐registration study
The party registration of tenure‐track faculty at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to large, public, elite schools, shows that the "one‐party campus" conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also ma…
Economists' policy views and voting
Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members
People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data are broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Re…
Do Off-Label Drug Practices Argue Against FDA Efficacy Requirements? A Critical Analysis of Physicians' Argumentation for Initial Efficacy Requirements
The amended Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act requires efficacy certification for a drug's initial uses ("on-label"), but does not require certification before physicians may prescribe the drug for subsequent uses ("off-label"). Does it make sense to require FDA efficacy certification for new drugs but not for new uses of old drugs? Using a sequential online survey, we carried on a "virtual conversation" with some 500 physicians. The survey asked whet…
Liberal Versus Conservative Stinks
Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning
In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds
Embarrassed as a Non-Left Professor
On the Deliberate Centrality of an Invisible Hand: Reply to Gavin Kennedy, Ryan Hanley and Craig Smith: Iea Economic Afairs
We previously showed that ‘led by an invisible hand’ was physically central in original editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. We suggested that Adam Smith did that deliberately. Three authors commented on our paper, Gavin Kennedy, Ryan Hanley and Craig Smith. In this article we reply to their comments.
Section One: Diagnosing Traditional Transit
The Forsaken-Liberty Syndrome: Looking at Published Judgments to Say Whether Economists Reach a Conclusion
Do economists reach a conclusion on a given policy issue? One way to answer the question is to survey economists at large. Another is to look at the published judgments of economists who have gone on the record. Relative to an anonymous survey, going on the record makes for much greater accountability, and presumably more personal responsibility. I discuss 11 studies of economists' published judgments. Several of them show greater support for lib…
A demand for encompassment: A Hayekian experimental parable about political psychology
Emile Durkheim said that when all of the members of a tribe or clan come together, they can sanctify the sacred and experience a spiritual "effervescence." Friedrich Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band and that modern forms of political collectivism have, in part, been atavistic reassertions of such tendencies. Picking up on Hayek, Daniel Klein has suggested …
Adam Smith's Non-foundationalism
George Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft: Selected Passages
The man within the breast, the supreme impartial spectator, and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards a…
On Jordan Peterson, Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing
Political science (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Economics (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Economic Theory and Institutions (7 works)