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Studies in Emergent Order

I want to bring your attention to the first issue of the on-line journal Studies in Emergent Order (papers are freely available). I was privileged to attend the recent conference associated with the Journal. A more eclectic and interesting group one couldn’t hope to find. To listen to and chat with Gus diZerega, David Emanuel…

Vermeule’s Hayek

In a post on the OUP blog Adrian Vermeule writes: The basic problem with “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is what we might call the Hayek Fallacy: a false comparison between the aggregate product of many minds and the product of a single mind. Perhaps that comparison is relevant in special contexts, such as…

The Other Side of Hayek

Stephen Smoliar has a post today that refers to Hayek’s The Sensory Order. I’m particularly pleased to hear that Smoliar’s sometime-colleague Brian Arthur holds Hayek in high regard. Coming from Arthur, that is high praise indeed. Smoliar also writes: Edelman himself does not appear to have acknowledged Hayek’s work, but this is entirely understandable. I’m pleased to…

Think Markets

I’d like to give a plug to a blog that’s just been started by some members of the Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes at the Department of Economics, New York University – ThinkMarkets. With names like Mario Rizzo, Bill Butos, Gene Callahan and Roger Koppl involved (this is no slight on the other contributors…

Orders and Borders

This past weekend I had the good fortune to be able to attend the Second Conference on Emergent Order and Society held in Portsmouth, NH. The term “conference” doesn’t really characterise the format – it is more akin to a colloquium where the emphasis is on genuine discussion and conversation in an intimate group (18 in all)…

The Social Epistemology of Blogging

Alvin Goldman, the doyen of analytic social epistemology, has a draft paper posted on his website entitled “The Social Epistemology of Blogging.” What’s gratifying to me is that via Richard Posner (whom Goldman cites), Hayek, who I have argued is the social epistemologist par excellence, makes an appearance. I have recently argued that if Hayek was centrally…

The Caricatured Hayek

There’s an article in The Australian taking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to task for his rather crude take on Hayek. Oliver Hartwich does a good job in rebutting Rudd’s views. Of course we expect the vulgarization of first-order thinkers by politicians. There are still many in academic circles who fall into the same stance when it comes…

Neuroeconomics

While I too am sceptical about the techno-ebullience associated with MRI scans what is interesting about the self-defeating claim in a cheekily entitled Economist article “Do economists need brains?” is this quote: neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in…

The Contemporary Relevance of The Sensory Order

I’m pleased to discover that there’s a discussion going on at the blog The Austrian Economists relating to a posting by Steve Horwitz. Other luminaries such as Roger Koppl have chimed in. For the past year I’ve been working on a paper on the contemporary relevance of The Sensory Order – hence my keen interest.