QJAE: Étatisme as the Root of Development Economics

Abstract: Development economics has invested substantial effort in formulating policies aimed at initiating development in underdeveloped countries, with a notable emphasis on the role of government. This article focuses on the transition from early intellectual forerunners such as John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith to the subsequent theories of development. Previous examinations, notably by Lewis (1988) and Sen (1983), have argued that if growth is taken as the definition of development, then Petty, Hume, and Smith are predecessors of development economics.

Abolfazl Shahabadi is a professor of economics at Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.

Vahid Omidi is a researcher at Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran, and an assistant professor at Qom University, Qom, Iran

JLS: Toward a Free Market Approach for Describing and Measuring Literary Archetypes and Tropes

ABSTRACT: This research proposes a free market approach to describing and measuring popular culture archetypes and stereotypes that result from the contemporary political culture of digital communications and an economic system of transmedia narratives. First, an historic overview of libertarian literary theory is given. Three existing systems of measuring archetypes and tropes are then described: crowd-sourced wiki projects (e.g., TV Tropes), academic classification systems (e.g., Aarne-Thompson index), and corporate marketing research (e.g., Neilsen PRIZM).

William A. Hanff is assistant professor of mass media at the University of the District of Columbia.

Friedman versus Rothbard

When we think of Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, what come to mind first are their contrary views on economics, but I’d like to discuss a different subject that might surprise some of my readers because they don’t associate Friedman with positions on it: American foreign policy. Jennifer Burns’s outstanding new biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) enables us to grasp more fully the differences between the foreign-policy views of Friedman and Rothbard, who unfortunately is not mentioned at all in the book.