I always enjoy reading Thorstein Veblen, partly because his writing strays back and forth across the line between "raising questions of real interest" to "just plain old dyspeptic and cantankerous." His 1918 essay "The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men" is full of comments from both categories, often closely overlapping.
One of the classic problems of economics involves how to make comparisons between the welfare of different people. As a common example, imagine taxing a high-income person and redistributing the money to a low-income person. In the utilitarian framework beloved of economists, a high-income person would receive less "utility" or happiness from that additional income than a low-income person would gain from receiving a transfer. Thus, it is argued, redistribution from high-income to low-income will increase the overall happiness or utility of society.
A few months ago many of us read about the conspiracy theory of “the nuclear option”, according to which China could generate a huge debt crisis in the United States and destroy the US economy if it sold its treasury holdings. I have already commented on it here.
Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) is probably best-remembered as the author of the (fabulously good) Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels and stories. But she also received first-class honors modern languages and medieval literature from Oxford in 1915, before women were officially awarded degrees, and later in life also published books of poetry, theology, and a well-regarded translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1948, she wrote an essay titled "The Lost Tools of Learning" (available various places on the web). A quick taste:
George Stigler once made the case for a market-based economy (in an entry about "Monopoly" in the Concise Encylopedia of Economics) just by arguing that it beats the alternatives.
In June 2014, I wrote an article called Draghi’s Plan does not fix Europe. It explained that the structural challenges of the eurozone - high government spending, excessive tax wedge, lack of technology leadership and demographics - were not going to be solved by a round of quantitative easing.
Herbert Simon and Allen Newell tell the story of how Adam Smith's ideas directly led to the development of the digital computer in an address delivered to the Twelfth National Meeting of the Operations Research Society of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 14, 1957. The lecture was published in Operations Research, January-February 1958, under the title "Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance Operations Research" (pp. 1-10). For those who like their stories with some credentials attached, Simon and Newell shared the Turing prize, sometimes referred to as the "Nobel prize in computing" in 1975, and Simon won the Nobel prize in economics in 1978.