Archive for 28 March 2007
Design Puzzles
| Steven Postrel |
So you’ve purchased your coffee and chosen to sit at one of those round outdoor tables. As you lean on the table to write comments on a paper, it rocks annoyingly, possibly spilling some of your coffee. You try moving the table slightly on the uneven pavement, hoping to stumble into a stable configuration for its four feet, but several attempts fail. Eventually you resort to shimming one of the table feet with a piece of folded up paper, or a stack of sweetener packets, and this creates at least a metastable condition. Looking around, you notice that many other tables have similar combat repairs, so that the cafe looks like a furniture trauma ward. (more…)
Reader’s Reports on The Road to Serfdom
| Peter Klein |
A new edition of The Road to Serfdom is coming out this year, positioned as volume 2 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Like all the volumes in the Collected Works, it includes a new foreword (here by series editor Bruce Caldwell), standardized and corrected notes and references, and previously unpublished supplementary material. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features some excerpts from the new material. Here, for example, are the reader’s reports on the manuscript, solicited by the University of Chicago Press in 1943 from Frank Knight and Jacob Marschak: (more…)
March & Simon: Early Socialist Calculation Revisionists
| Nicolai Foss |
It is now commonly recognized that the majority of the economics profession for about four decades held an erroneous view of the nature of the “socialist calculation debate.” In particular, the nature of the arguments put forward by Mises and Hayek were misconstrued.
Revisionism took off in the mid 1980s with the work of Peter Murrell (e.g., here) and Don Lavoie (e.g., here). From a mainstream perspective, Murrell argued that the Austrians had developed sophisticated insights in property rights economics and the agency problem and had applied these insights to the problem of socialist calculation. Lavoie highlighted the distintive Austrian knowledge argument in the calculation debate, in particular emphasizing Hayek’s contribution. A bit later, Salerno and others emphasized the distinctiveness of Mises’ contribution. Thus, whereas Mises stressed the need for a distributed process of entrepreneurial judgment in the context of a private ownership economy characterized by uncertainty, Hayek put more of an emphasis on the impossibility under socialism of harnessing and processing massive amounts of knowledge, particularly under dynamic conditions. (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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