This paper considers an economic approach to autistic individuals, as a window for understanding autism, as a new and growing branch of neuroeconomics (how does behavior vary with neurology?), and as a foil for better understanding non-autistics and their cognitive biases. The relevant economic...

Economics, properly understood, makes sense out the complex web of historical relations that constitute reality, namely by utilizing economic theory. Economics without price theory is not economic theory, and measurement without theory isn't empirically meaningful. However, graduate students are...

Game theory holds out the promise of transforming the core of economic theory from ascience of rational choice into a science of human interaction. While traditional gametheory does open into social interaction, it mostly neglects another central feature ofeconomic intuition: spontaneous...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

This essay is the penultimate draft of Chapter 1 of a book that carries the working title Macroeconomics as Systems Theory: Emergence, Institutions, and Economic Process. This book examines the material of macroeconomic theory by looking through a different analytical window from what most...

Our focus in this chapter will be on the methodological role that Stigler played in validating what he regarded as the science of economics that he had inherited from his own teacher, Frank Knight, and how this affected his understanding not only of economic theory but also public policy....

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...

Frank Knight famously remarked nearly a century ago that the primary problems that stem from societal living together do not arise because of what we don’t know but rather arise because of what we know that isn’t true. This paper pursues Knight’s theme by incorporating three elements into...

Macro theories explore the properties of an economic system in its entirety, in contrast to the focus of micro theories on parts of that system. Where most macro theories reduce an economy to a representative agent, we follow Wagner (2012, 2020) in treating a macro economy as an ecology of...

This paper is concerned with the way economists conceptualize the relationship between politics and property rights. It is customary for economists to treat polity and economy as comprising separate domains of human action. In contrast, we treat society as a single domain of action comprised of...