This article is Part II of a survey of Russia's position as one of the great powers and how it has evolved from 1815 to the present day. Part 1 ended on the eve of the Great Patriotic War (1941‒1945), and Part II begins where Part 1 left off, with some data on the Great Patriotic War and its influence on the USSR's position as a great power. It deals with post-war reconstruction and then considers the Cold War and post-Soviet Russia (1992‒2022). Attention is paid to Soviet economic policies, the reasons for the long-run decline in Soviet economic growth, and the state collapse of 1991. Explanatory theories used include List's economic recommendations for medium-developed countries, Wintrobe's political economy of dictatorship, and Tilly's analysis of the war–state relationship. It is concluded that a relatively poor country can become a great power and maintain that position for long periods if it has institutions that enable it to squeeze its population for military purposes.

This paper discusses a research agenda for post-Northian institutional economics, which focuses on economic cognitive institutions and minds–institutions interactions. Douglass North introduced the ‘shared mental models’ and ‘shared beliefs’ concepts, which were considered the cutting edge of cognitive science at that time, the so-called first wave of extended mind theory. Subsequently, two more waves arose, but they went unnoticed by institutional economists who mostly continue to use internalist and reductionist approaches to cognition. Post-Northian institutional economics offers a deeper understanding of the relationship between cognition and institutions in the spirit of third-wave extended mind theory. The research agenda emphasizes a focus on socially extended cognition and the conception of cognitive institutions as shared mental processes (Petracca and Gallagher, 2020). I propose an alternative definition of cognitive institutions as interactively and polycentrically co-produced cognitive norms; this approach highlights normativity, co-production, and distributed active agency in extended cognitive processes. I propose two domains in which this third-wave framework can be used: ecological rationality and cognitive–cultural niche construction. This paper encourages a discussion on the prospects of a third-wave enactivist turn in institutional economics.

In this paper, I introduce an important dynamic function performed by social institutions, which consists in helping individual actors to adapt to significant changes taking place in their environment. This adapting function is juxtaposed against the statically-oriented properties of institutions, which comprise their enabling, constraining, and orienting functions. I explicate the three major adapting roles of social institutions, which correspond to the cognitive, normative, and regulatory institutional elements, and explore the nine principal mechanisms by which social institutions can accelerate the adaptation processes. I examine the main outcomes of the adaptation processes supported by social institutions, as well as the key enablers and barriers to successful adaptation. I present a co-evolutionary model of adaptive dynamics involving individuals, institutions, and the broader external environment, and discuss the major implications of the proposed framework.

Does democracy cause gender equality? To address this question, I use the unexpected Second Vatican Council (1962–65) as part of a shock-based identification strategy. The Second Vatican Council brought forward in time transitions to democracy that would have happened anyway and triggered transitions to democracy that would not otherwise have occurred. I use this plausibly exogenous variation in democracy to offer a causal estimate. According to my baseline specification, one standard deviation increase in democracy leads to three-fifths of a standard deviation increase in gender equality. I also peruse qualitative evidence to sketch a causal mechanism.

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 led to extensive new government regulations and lockdown policies that, according to some prominent definitions, severely reduced economic freedom. However, many of these new pandemic-related regulatory restrictions on economic freedom are largely missed by the Economic Freedom of the World Report (EFW). This paper first adjusts the Our World in Data Covid-19 Stringency Index into a measure of lockdown regulatory freedom and then merges it into the EFW index to better measure countries' 2020 cross-sectional relative economic freedom. We find significant differences in the relative ranking of economic freedom between countries once we adjust for lockdown regulatory restrictions.

A property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human bodies with minds that feel, think, know, and want gives rise to a custom of property with meaning and purpose. Property is primary because ideas are primary.

A critical response to Bart Wilson's (2022) theory of property, focusing on his assertion of a final cause in the evolution of property. It argues that while Darwin's great achievement was to remove final causes from earthly evolution and thus move the question of how biological life is organized from theology to science, Wilson's apparent restoration of a final cause to the evolution of property would move the question of how social life is organized from science back to theology, a clear step backward.

Bart Wilson suggests that economists interested in property rights have it all backwards when they define ownership as a bundle of rights. Rather he argues that ownership comes first in the form of an abstract concept. I claim there is a small element of truth to this, but the bulk of what he argues is already understood through the concept of economic property rights. Wilson's consternation is mostly the result of a failure to appreciate this latter concept.

In a recent article Wilson explores the origins and explanation of ownership (property) as a custom, and argues that the custom of ownership is the primary concept and that property rights are subordinated to ownership. I argue that Wilson's subordination argument is unpersuasive; the linguistic evidence used by Wilson fits better with the concept of possession; and ownership is not a human universal.

Bart Wilson argues that property is based on custom, not rights. Wilson (2022) further argues for the primacy of property over property rights. Wilson's research, including the recent book, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind (2020), is a significant and arguably pathbreaking contribution to the vast literature on property and property rights. It also falls into the trap of economic arguments that unnecessarily devalue legal rights. I ague that we can all agree that ideas about property are always important to understanding property rights but that property rights still rule. This is in part because those who have property typically care most about property rights. I also argue that Wilson's concept of property is too focused on private ownership, rather than shared ownership or even government ownership of property. I suggest that considering the idea of sharing and other legitimate forms of property ownership alongside private ownership would generalize Wilson's constructivist theory of property and improve our ability to explain the diversity of property rights.

‘The Primacy of Property’ is a deep discussion of property as an evolved institution and should stimulate useful discussion of how property rights and transaction costs economists should ply their trade.

The current approach to the study of property cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. It also cordons off morality thereby opening a hole in how property rights work. The scientific difficulty is that our analysis must constantly shift between the individual, their local community, and the larger polity in which both are embedded, in order to explain simultaneously different levels of consequences with different kinds of causes. The difficulty is made worse when we construct mental models without the human mind. My framework leaves the human mind in. Since Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, the study of property rights has had a decidedly external stance: the institution imposes itself on the individual from the outside. The problem of property rights, however, also calls for inquiry from the inside out of human agency, because in the study of property, ideas are primary.