Harmonising Hayek and Posner: Revisiting Posner, Hayek & the Economic Analysis of Law

Review of “Economic Analysis of Law,” By Richard A. Posner

Hayek and current developments in economic methodology

This essay is rather different than most of the others in the volume, because it deals in the main with theory rather with practice. But abstract theory can have profound political implications. Empirical evidence that market-oriented systems work better than centrally planned ones is overwhelming. Yet it is always open to the would-be planner to argue that previous designs were flawed, whereas...

Hayek and Socialism

I have received many helpful comments on this paper from participants at the History of Economics Society meetings at the University of British Columbia, at seminars given at the University of Georgia, at the Austrian Colloquium at New York University, at the York University-University of Toronto Workshop on the History of Economics, and at the Duke University History of Political Economy Works...

Hayek and Modern Evolutionary Theory

Hayek was a firm believer in the effect of evolution on human behavior. This was a real advance since he wrote in a time when most social scientists believed in the “blank slate” (Pinker, 2002) and denied the influence of biology on human actions. Moreover, Hayek got the basic outline of the problem right. Most of human existence has been spent in small groups (25–250 members) and many of our t...

Keynes, Hayek and Complexity

In the spirit of the overall topic of the conference, in this paper I consider the extent to which economic theory includes elements of the complex systems approach. I am setting to one side here the developments over the past decade in applying complex systems analysis to economic problems. This is not because this recent work is not important. It most certainly is. But I want to argue that th...