HeyJaredSeeing like Chicago
Observations about Chicago economics, sociology, literature and more by Erwin Dekker
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- Sep 24, 2026
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Adam Smith in Chicago....Sociology (opens the original)
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This weekend kicks off this year’s Mercatus Fellowship, and we are reading Adam Smith: large chunks of his Theory of Moral Sentiments and selections of his Wealth of Nations. They say you see new things every time you read classic texts, which of course is lofty. But I must admit I like a different effect of familiarity with some classic works better, namely that you see more in other texts you read. And knowing Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments has helped me a great deal to make sense of w
The Gary Becker and Michel Foucault seminars (opens the original)
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There is a paper which has always fascinated me about the relationship between public choice and critical theory, with the great title: How far is it from Rochester to Frankfurt? Rochester was one of the intellectual homes of public choice, and Frankfurt, well, they are the origin of the universally despised cultural marxism, right???I am not sure whether the meeting of minds I want to focus on today was inspired
Ronald Coase (belated) response to Friedman ‘53 (opens the original)
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There is a funny way in which the Frank Knight students, from Kenneth Boulding to James Buchanan, and from Milton Friedman to George Stigler continue conversations even as their respective research programs are ostensibly growing apart. A good example is Ronald H. Coase’s How Should Economists Choose (1981). Coase was only a visiting student to Chicago in the early 1930s and apparently left not much of an impression there. That does not mean that Coase forgot about Chicago or Knight, and his mom
Some unlikely Great American novels (opens the original)
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A fascinating aspect of the 1930s and 1940s in Chicago is the very intimate connections between the writers and poets of the city and the sociologists. Many of the significant novelists like Nelson Algren, Willard Motley (Knock on any door), Richard Wright, James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) take at least a couple of courses at the sociology department. And their subject matter of (criminal) youth growing up in the immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago is clearly influenced by the questions that occu
Erving Goffman: “we construct a criminal’s nature to fit his crime” (opens the original)
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As my book is taking shape more and more, I have a pretty definite sense of what will be confined to the footnotes, and what will make the main text. And I figure that being in the footnotes is a good reason to blog about it. More importantly, according to the maxim that ‘if it’s not important enough to be in the main text it is not important enough to be in a footnote,’ I might well end up deleting a lot of the footnotes in upcoming revisions.In any case, note 18 in my current draft of chapter
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