The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the "Hayek hypothesis:" equilibrium prices and the gains from trade can be achieved in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information, and in...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

Elinor Ostrom, a recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009, had a foundational contribution to the Public Choice movement and to the rise of the new institutionalism and has been a key figure in the resurgence of political economy. Her studies...

The article argues that Ostroms’ institutionalism has a dimension that is complex and profound enough to deserve to be considered a “social theory” or a “social philosophy”. The paper pivots around the thesis that the “social philosophy” behind the Bloomington School’s research...

Supporters of basic income theories have an admirable goal. However, applying the economic way of thinking to the problem, we see that, while the goal is certainly laudable, the attempt to achieve that goal can lead to disastrous results stemming from knowledge and incentive problems faced by...

Daniel Klein (Klein 1997, Klein and Orsborn 2009 and Klein and Briggeman forthcoming) and Israel Kirzner (forthcoming) have been engaged in a debate concerning how economists should understand and use the terms “coordination” and “economic goodness”. Klein and Briggeman (forthcoming)...

We recognize the comments made by Horwitz (2010) and Koppl (2010) in their replies to D'Amico and Boettke (2010), "Making Sense out of The Sensory Order." Furthermore, this paper hopes to explain what role D'Amico and Boettke do see for cognitive neuroscience in the study of Austrian Economics....

The financial crisis of 2008 has challenged the reputation of the free-market economy in the public imagination in a way that it has not been challenged since the Great Depression. The intellectual consensus after World War II was that markets are unstable and exploitive and thus in need of...

The efficiency of “quasimarkets”—decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition—is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement in political economy called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The...