The link is here, the table of contents is described as follows: 

Economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college, at least among the 4835 Americans who completed a Zogby International online survey. Economic enlightenment is highest among those self-identifying “conservative” and “libertarian,” and descends through “moderate,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” Other variables include party affiliation, religious participation, union membership, NASCAR fandom, and Wal-Mart patronage. Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel Klein report.

When the White House changes party, do economists change their tune on budget deficits? Brett Barkley does a systematic investigation. Six economists are found to change their tune – Paul Krugman in a significant way, Alan Blinder in a moderate way, and Martin Feldstein, Murray Weidenbaum, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Solow in a minor way – while eleven are found to be fairly consistent.

44 economists answer the questionnaire about a market-failure rationale for pre-market approval of drugs and devices:

The questionnaire posed reform questions and tested responses. The 44 interviews provide a rich set of discourse that help one decide: Is there a sensible market-failure rationale?

Supporters of pre-market approval include Kenneth Arrow, John E. Brazier, William Comanor, Randall P. Ellis, John Hutton, Naoki Ikegami, Jonathan Karnon, Gérard de Pouvourville, F.M. Scherer, and 14 others.

The supporters of liberalization are James F. Burgess, Jr., Noel Campbell, J. Jaime Caro, Thomas DeLeire, David Dranove, Dale Gieringer, Paul Grootendorst, David Henderson, Randall Holcombe, Charles Hooper, Sam Peltzman, Paul Rubin, Shirley Svorny, Robert Tollison, and Michael R. Ward.

The Euro symposium response: Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea respond to commentators on their study of what US economists were saying about the prospect of the euro, and comment on recent events and debates.

Econometric errors in an Applied Economics article. Dimitris Hatzinikolaou reports on the article and his efforts to get his critique heard.

A 1903 letter against protectionism in Britain endorsed by 16 economists including Bastable, Bowley, Cannan, Edgeworth, Marshall, Pigou, Scott, and Smart.

The first one is sure to cause some controversy and I view it in part as an attempt to revise the portrait of the elites put forward by Bryan Caplan; I await his response.  My own view is that "who in the general public understands economics best" is very sensitive to which questions we ask.  Libertarian-leaning voters have a better understanding of government failure, but left-leaning voters are more likely to understand adverse selection or aggregate demand management.  Which is a more important topic?  That may depend on the researcher's own point of view.  What's the closest we can come to a value-neutral test of whether elites or the "common man" understand economic reasoning better?  In the meantime, Bram Cohen understands economics pretty well.

Increasing automation and competition have reduced the Big Board and Nasdaq’s volume in securities they list from as much as 80 percent in the last decade. Now, two-thirds of trading in their companies takes place off their networks because orders are dispersed across dozens of competing venues.

Here is a wee bit more.

"You do not propose to a woman without absolute assurance that she'll say yes," says Ethan, and Mr. Brentan agrees.

There is broader context:

In 1972, on a park bench in Birmingham, Ala., Garner Lee Green's father proposed to her mother. The proposal came out of the blue. She said yes.

"That doesn't happen to people anymore," says Ms. Green, who is 30. And it certainly wasn't the way her husband asked her to marry him several years ago. The two of them talked for a long time about how and when the proposal would happen. "I was ready before he was, so we had to come to a meeting of the minds about a time frame. The negotiations lasted about six months," Ms. Green says.

So what are the economics?  Presumably a proposal "out of the blue" is more likely to be accepted, and offered, when there is potential disagreement about the correct "market prices" of various potential partners.  A lower status man might try to snare a higher-quality woman, perhaps by catching her off-guard, or he might be trying to signal, with his daring and panache, that he is higher status after all.

The most likely ones to accept such proposals are women who are unsure of their "quality," either on the mating market or in unmarried life.  Accepting the proposal takes on one kind of risk but relieves the woman of another.

Overall it seems that women are today more certain about the utility value of their alternatives to a surprise marriage proposal and that means they turn them down.  The proposals may seem like harmless "cheap talk" (propose to lots of women above your station in life and thus the custom persists, even if it rarely succeeds), but Google-savvy, credential-savvy women can evaluate men better than ever before and the lower status guys don't get close enough to them to try a shock proposal, much less make it stick.

Is it a prediction that rapid, surprise proposals are more common in societies where male high achievers are hard to identify in advance?  How important is inequality of income and volatility/uncertainty of income?

Perhaps for aesthetic reasons, I find the decline of the surprise proposal slightly sad (though in part reflective of some positive societal developments), and I am pleased to reaffirm that I do not believe in the consultative approach.

I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.