Elected president of the Southern Economic Association in 1964, he used his bully pulpit to prescribe “what economists should do.” They should cease focusing on problems of resource distribution—what the field called “allocation problems”—because the very idea that inequality was a bad thing led to looking for remedies, which in turn led the discipline toward an applied “mathematics of social engineering.” Instead, they should adopt his radical methodological individualism in all that they studied, and assume that individuals always sought personal gain, whether in the economy or in politics.
