|
|
Article: Homo Economicus and the Salem Witch Trials.(Statistical Data Included)
- Article from:
- The Journal of Economic Education
- Article date:
- March 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
McClure and Van Cott (1994) point out that examples selected from American folklore and history can illustrate economics principles. Boyer and Nissenbaum (1974) also provide three possibilities when they suggest that the Salem witch trials rank somewhere between the Plymouth Colony and Custer's Last Stand in familiarity to Americans. These latter two episodes have neat economic twists: The Plymouth colonists benefited from land privatization (a property rights lesson), and the U.S. government agents who worked at Indian reservations, and were employed by Custer as intelligence sources faced monetary incentives in reporting falsely high reservation population counts, thus ...