Tag Archives: Friedrich Hayek

 The Road to SerfRanddom I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — “Why the worst get on top.” Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary? Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a...

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The...

Not.Naked KeynesianismThe end of neoliberalism?Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Interesting exploration of Nassim Taleb's systematic thought and its implicitly evolutionary basis. Global Inequality The importance of Taleb’s system: from the Fourth Quadrant to the Skin in the Game Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International...

Hayek, Coase and uncertainty. In any case I find it fascinating that the two, Hayek and Coase, both in their own way, brought the impact of uncertainty to the fore in the same year. It’s a shame that economics has never fully embraced, nor realized, the full richness of their ideas. Neither author was willing to step into the world that they clearly understood existed. Hayek was right about universal central planning: it is an impossibility. He was wrong to assert that this implied...

Pirate bands are radically democratic and egalitarian: Hayek and the evolutionary imperative. EvonomicsThe Invisible Hook: How Pirate Society Proves Economic Self-Interest WrongDavid Sloan Wilson | SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo