In the early 1990s, many economists came to see education as key to growth. N. Gregory Mankiw, David Romer, and David N. Weil (1992) famously augmented Robert M. Solow's (1956) neoclassical growth model by including the secondary school enrollment rate as a measure of investment in "human capital." The result was a policy agenda that sought to increase funding for education. Hence, when the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City invited numerous leading economists to its annual symposium at Jackson Hole on August 27-29, 1992, this became the major theme of the conference. Mankiw (1992, 90-91), for example, described education as one of the "four secrets to fast growth." On this, there was some consensus among assembled grandees, who were predominantly employed at Harvard. "If the often-bickering economists were able to forge a consensus on anything," the New York Times reported, "it was that providing more education is a sure way for a nation to increase its output. Time and again, the economists stressed the importance of improving 'human capital,' meaning that a better-educated, better-trained work force can lift a nation's growth rate" (Greenhouse 1992). Alongside the economic-growth narrative is a parallel narrative that portrays education spending as key to reducing inequality. It is based on a model first proposed by Lawrence F. Katz and Kevin M. Murphy (1992) that has been massively influential. This article reviews how the model has repeatedly failed to predict the evolution of its dependent variable, the college wage premium. Various specifications of the econometrics used to test the model are replicated using data from David H. Autor, Claudia Goldin, and Katz's (2020) most recent update. Their dataset for the college wage premium and the relative supply of college-educated labor covers the period 1914 to 2017, and it has been extended here to 2023 using the same source, the Current Population Survey (CPS).2 That dataset is first used to replicate Katz and Murphy's (1992) original results and then the original out-of-sample test performed by Autor, Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney (2008). Finally, the elaborate specifications found in Goldin and Katz's (2008) book The Race between Education and Technology are replicated. It should be stressed that the replications are not exact, given how the dataset has changed over time. Nonetheless, they are sufficiently close to the originals to demonstrate the problem that the Katz-Murphy model has routinely faced: as Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2008) first noted, the model is unable to predict the evolution of the college wage premium, which has led to ex-post specification searching to make the model fit the data. Standard tests from time series econometrics indicate, moreover, that the model is misspecified and has on for its validation.
I have been asked to respond to "The Impartial Spectator Rises," an article by Daniel B. Klein, Nicholas R. Swanson, and Jeffrey T. Young (KSY), published in this journal (Klein et al. 2025). I am grateful and honored to have the opportunity to do so. I believe their study is useful for scholars because it puts into stark relief a core interpretive question at the heart of Smith's corpus: to what extent is the impartial spectator an ideal observer? The problem, summarized, is this: the impartial spectator is the personification of Adam Smith's theory of conscience in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments (TMS). By nature, moral actors grow to become virtuous by confirming the propriety of their actions and sentiments through social affirmation. Taken alone, this would subordinate all individual action to others' judgment and community norms. It would also inhibit progressive moral growth. To forestall this, Smith describes his actors as cultivating their ability to imagine an impartial spectator: a second identity whose judgment is distinct from, and supersedes, the community. This imagined impartial spectator is the final arbiter of the moral actor's self-evaluation, and virtuous people rely on it to confirm, deny, or modify social judgment. Smith describes his moral psychology by intertwining two different frameworks of understanding. The first is a naturalism that seeks to explore individual and collective action a Newtonian lens. Hume called this "the science of man" (Hume 1739-40, 3-6).2 The second involves theologically-coded language that grounds the impartial spectator's judgment in God, whom Smith refers to in a variety of ways including "the Deity," "the Author of Nature," and "the man within the breast." These frameworks are compatible from both a theistic and deistic point of view, but they are not compatible within naturalism. The questions at hand, and the interpretive puzzles that Smith scholars struggle with, are these: What is the metaphysical status of the impartial spectator? What are its epistemological limits? Is it an agent of God through which someone can access divine knowledge, or is it a human creation limited by the fallibilities of the imagination? These two questions frame KSY and my response, here. Klein, Swanson, and Young describe three possibilities for understanding Smith's normative moral psychology. First, following Roderick Firth, an impartial spectator may be an ideal observer with divine grounding whose normativity comes from an Archimedean point of view.3 Second, the impartial spectator may be "flattened" in that it is a product of an individual agent's imagination and therefore limited by the imaginer's fallible capacities.4 They correctly cite me as someone who defends this second interpretation. Third, the impartial spectator may be a "weak" compromise of the other two: an abstract figure with special epistemological access that is compatible with, but not necessarily bound to, a Christian god. KSY argue for this third understanding and provide a literature review of those who hold opposing positions. I take no issue with their presentation of the landscape of Smith scholarship. Nor do I have any concerns regarding their summary of my work, although I'd like to express my mild surprise at their reaching back three decades to my doctoral dissertation (and my pleasant relief that such an immature work was coherent enough to be relevant) (Weinstein 1998). Instead, my goal in this response is to articulate why I continue to disagree with the divinely-infused interpretations of the impartial spectator and reject their compromise position. I will present conceptual, biographical, terminological, exegetical, and political objections to their argument, in that order. I will not summa- rize the two alternative positions in detail, presuming my readers' familiarity with the Smithian debate and context. KSY's literature review far surpasses what I could present here, and I encourage all interested scholars to become familiar with it.
In this article we employ bibliometric methods to show how the study areas of central banking research have creeped increasingly into environment, inequality, gender, and race/inclusivity-related topics. Before turning to our investigation, we review the nature, privileges, and mandates of central banks, along with current trends, to explain why the investigation was undertaken.
Online controlled experiments, or A/B tests, are commonly used to evaluate ideas and their implementations in websites and applications (G. Z. Georgiev 2019; Kohavi, Tang, and Xu 2020; Luca and Bazer man 2020; Thomke 2020; Weigel 2024). Large companies run tens of thousands of A/B tests per year. The thirteen organizations that attended the Practical Online Controlled Experiments Summit in 2018 "tested more than one hundred thousand experiment treatments last year"
In an article published in Sustainability, Michael Olumekor, Harman Preet Singh, and Ibrahim Abdullah Alhamad (2024) examine the impact of income, internet access and food prices on online grocery sales in Russia. They do so on the meso level, using panel data for 16 out of 85 regions in Russia. Their findings show that only the median income of a region has a significant (positive) impact on online grocery sales. We show that the article by Olumekor, Singh, and Alhamad (henceforth, OSA) suffers from multiple shortcomings. A first weakness is that their sample is too small and not representative. Additionally, the authors fail to scale their dependent variable and do not take into account cross-border sales. Below, we first summarize OSA's method and results. Subsequently, we point out the concerns with their approach, and we then address the most important issues. Our final results differ substantially from those of OSA. Most notably, we find that internet access also matters. Moreover, the estimated impact of regional income seems economically implausible.
The first International Working Men's Association was created in St Martin's Hall in London on 28 September 1864. Its rules were adopted in the last week in October of the same year by a score of individuals, exceedingly obscure at that date, the majority of whom are, if anything, even less familiar one hundred years after the event.1 How many, even among well-informed students of nineteenth-century social history, could call to memory the lives, even the names, of Limousin, Dupleix, Lessner and Hermann Jung, Schapper and Bobczynski, or even Levy of Geneva or Major Luigi Wolff? Who remembers the names of the rest of the Communist League? The careers of Tolain, Fribourg, Varlin, De Paepe, Eccarius,2 Howell, Odger, Cremer may be somewhat better known. Still, it seems unlikely that even the part played by these founding fathers would linger in the memory if it were not for the central figure behind this organisation. It was he who made of this scattered collection of individuals, not over-rich in ideas, or even in organisational ability, an instrument which, if it did not itself alter history, laid the foundations of a movement which did exactly this.
Some recent papers in economics challenge one of the central prescriptions of the pro-housing movement: zoning liberalization. I investigate two sets of findings. One paper finds that housing supply has no long-run effect on local rents, while two others find that restricting housing supply might translate into amenities. I review the methods and findings of these papers, as well as contrary findings from related research. I conclude that the bulk of the evidence so far still supports the conclusion that supply-side zoning liberalization typically lowers local rents over meaningful time horizons without generating disamenities substantial enough to overcome the welfare benefits of liberalization.
This article provides a critical analysis of passages in Adrian Karatnycky's Battleground Ukraine (2024b) and articles (2010; 2020; 2024a; 2024c) concerning the Maidan massacre and the overthrow of President Victor Yanukovych and his government in 2014. Research of these events is crucial for understanding the origins of the conflicts that followed, specifically the Russian annexation of pro-separatist Crimea in the South of Ukraine, the civil war and Russian military interventions in Donbas in the East of Ukraine, and the war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion (see Bandeira 2019; Black and Johns 2015; Cohen 2018; Hahn 2018; Katchanovski 2015a; 2016a; 2016b; 2022; 2024a; 2025a; Kudelia 2016; 2018; Sakwa 2015). Understanding who was responsible for the Maidan massacre and the related overthrow of Yanukovych that followed this massacre is important from scholarly and conflict resolution perspectives because these events were critical junctures in the conflict escalation that culminated in the Russia-Ukraine war and the proxy NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. Because of the importance of the Maidan, which I have researched extensively in scholarly work, and because Karatnycky's Ukraine is Yale I have selected his writings as an object for critical review. I examine not only his book chapter concerning the Maidan but also his four related articles because his narrative concerning the Maidan massacre and the overthrow of Yanukovych is quite idiosyncratic and not consistent, in particular, concerning the far-right involvement in this mass killing of the police and the protesters.
