Gordon Tullock meets Phineas Gage: The political economy of lobotomies in the United States

Incentives affect the ways in which scientific research is disseminated and translated into practice. From 1936 to 1972, approximately fifty thousand lobotomies were performed in the US, with the majority occurring during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, the lobotomy's popularity coincided with a consensus within the medical community that the procedure was ineffective. To explain this paradox, we follow the framework developed by...