Dismal Science
By John D. Mueller
Posted: Thursday, April 6, 2006
Freakonomics asks all kinds of interesting questions but, like modern economics generally, is ill-equipped to provide the right answers to those involving gifts or crimes.  Its authors famously -- but wrongly -- claim, for example, that legalizing abortion lowered homicide rates 15-20 years later by eliminating infants who would have become murderers.  In fact, it raised the homicide rate almost at once by turning their fathers back into men without dependent children.  Freakonomics relies on the "economic approach to human behavior," which blinds it to the near-perfect trade-off between homicide and economic fatherhood -- something easily observed by economists using the original "human approach to economic behavior" of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.   [Read More]

The End of Economics
Or, Is Utilitarianism Finished?
By John D. Mueller
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2002
Most modern economists assume that economic choice involves only the means and not the ends of human action. The reason seems to be that most modern economists are ignorant of the history of their own discipline. Leading economists attempt to explain all human behavior, including love and hate, as a maximization of "utility." But historically and logically, an adequate description of economic choice has always required both a ranking of persons as ends and a ranking of scarce goods as means. What is missing from modern economics is an adequate description of the ranking of persons as ends.   [Read More]