Of Interest to All Market Process Economists

by Gene Callahan

Dan Klein responds, on the meaning of economic coordination, mostly to Israel Kirzner, and secondarily to several others, including me. Here is Klein’s abstract:

The Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Private Enterprise featured a complicated set of papers. The lead article was a long paper by Jason Briggeman and me, on Israel Kirzner’s work on coordination and discovery. The thrust of our paper was an affirmation of Kirzner’s central claims, but with two alterations. First, we propose that the coordination that figures into the central issues ought to be understood as what we call concatenate coordination. Second, the central statements at issue ought not be asserted as holding 100 percent of the time, but rather should be by-and-large statements, making for a strong presumption, not a categorical result. Israel Kirzner then replied to our paper. The pair of papers was then the object of commentary by Peter Boettke and Daniel D’Amico, Steven Horwitz, Gene Callahan, and Martin Ricketts. Here, I respond to Kirzner, and, in an appendix, more briefly to the others.

Hayek after 35 Years

by Jerry O’Driscoll  

Today I reread F. A. Hayek’s Nobel Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge.”  Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1974 and delivered his lecture on December 11, 1974. I was amazed at how modern it was, and appropriate once again for the times.  

The 1970s were terrible times: stop-go demand management policies had produced stagflation that would continue for the rest of the decade.  Hayek said that “we have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.” He charged that the mess had been produced by policies the majority of economists “recommended and even urged governments to pursue.”