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This paper examines William Stanley Jevons’s approach to human “improvement” in comparison with that of Carl Menger. In Jevons’s view, people are relatively static when left to their own devices. Thus, to “attack” the “citadel of poverty” they must be improved by those who know what is “best” for them. Menger’s view of people as planners, by contrast, is one in which people are capable of improving themselves. Jevons was a social reformer who placed great faith in education, and painful training and instruction, broadly defined, as key mechanisms of reform. Less frequently acknowledged but no less important, Menger also foresaw “the improvement of mankind” from within, as consumers came to better understand how best to attain their wants and needs over time.

Our approach is largely historical, argument by example. We leave it to the theoreticians and empiricists to take the argument in a more technical direction.¹ Throughout, we suppose that germs are self-interested and they have a research question, for example, how might our species improve the chances of survival, the answer to which might potentially benefit germs (or, harm them by less).

Focusing on the relatively unstudied status of women in classical political economy, this important collection of essays will inform, delight, and even surprise the reader. The essays provide testimony both to the intellectual richness of the period, as well as the extraordinary social and political events of the time. The most striking unifying theme of the work is how social and political contexts served to generate the economic ideas of and about women.

This volume contains papers given at the third biennial Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies Conference on Austrian Economics. The conference was held at a beautiful waterfront facility of Simon Fraser University on October 15 and 16, 2010. In spite of all warnings to expect fog and rain in the Pacific Northwest, the weather was sunny and mild, as were the spirits of the conferees. Our topic title, “Austrian Views on Experts and Epistemic Monopolies,” was perhaps a bit misleading because some of the views represented were not “Austrian.” Indeed, the editorial mission of Advances in Austrian Economics has been to promote dialogue between the “Austrian” tradition of economics and other traditions both within in economics and beyond. Participants discussed the problem of experts from several Austrian and non-Austrian perspectives. While representing different points of view, the participants did tend toward the view that experts may pose a problem in one way or another, especially when they enjoy an epistemic monopoly.