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An underappreciated aspect of F. A. Hayek’s mature views about rationality is the inter-relation of the “pure logic of choice” and rule-following behavior. Sometimes it is asserted that Hayek abandoned his earlier understanding of individual rationality and replaced it with a completely rule-oriented conception of decisionmaking. In fact, however, the analysis in Hayek’s Sensory Order gives us the framework in which the relative roles of explicit choice-logic and rule-following can be discerned. Furthermore, this framework also shows that his fundamental conception of individual rationality is pragmatic, contextual, modifiable, and ecological. While standard neoclassical economists were axiomatizing the explicit logic of choice, Hayek was decades ahead of these economists in understanding the nature of decisionmaking outside of completely artificial worlds in which there are no cognitive limits and in which the structure of the environment is simple. This paper attempts to lay the foundation for an integrated understanding of Hayek’s pragmatic rule-following rationality and the “ecological rationality” of Gerd Gigerenzer and other researchers.

The paper published below was prepared by Taylor Ostrander for Frank Knight’s course, Economic Theory, Economics 301, during the Fall 1933 quarter.

We argue that the future of Austrian political economy rests on the study of how institutional entrepreneurs discover and implement alternative institutional arrangements conducive to economic growth. This requires a dual level of analysis in spontaneous order studies. How such institutional arrangements manifest themselves is ultimately an empirical question. As a progressive research program, Austrian political economy will entail cross-fertilization with other empirical branches of political economy that illustrate its own central theoretical contributions to political economy, namely economic calculation, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order. Accordingly, we argue that such cross-fertilization with the work of Ronald Coase and Elinor Ostrom will further expound the institutional counterpart of “rivalry” in the market process, namely polycentricism and its empirical manifestation. Understanding the distinct relationship between rivalry and polycentricism will provide the central theoretical underpinning of institutional evolution.

Hayek’s “Use of knowledge in society” is often misunderstood. Hayek’s point is not just that prices aggregate dispersed knowledge, but also that the knowledge embedded in prices would not exist absent the market process. Later, in The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that this same idea can also be applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Democracy is not just about aggregating preferences. Absent the democratic process, the knowledge necessary to solve collective problems is not generated. We compare this perspective on democracy to Bryan Caplan’s and Helen Landemore’s theories, and we argue that Hayek’s account focused on “opinion falsification” is richer. Unlike Caplan or Landemore, who adopt a static perspective, Hayek is more interested in the long-term tendencies and feed-back mechanisms. For example, why do Western democracies seem to have gradually moved away from the most deleterious types of economic policies (such as price controls)? Hayek’s conjecture is that the democratic process itself is responsible for this. We connect Hayek’s conjecture about democracy to the broader argument made by Vincent Ostrom, who has claimed that public choice should study not just incentive structures, but also collective learning processes. We believe that this line of research, that is, comparative institutional analysis based on the collective learning capacities embedded in alternative institutional arrangements, merits a lot more attention than it has received so far. The question “Which collective choice arrangements have the best epistemic properties?” is one of the most important neglected questions in political economy.

The methodological individualism and subjectivism of the Austrian tradition in economics is often associated with a methodological dualism, i.e. the claim that the nature of its subject matter, namely purposeful and intentional human action, requires economics to adopt a methodology that is fundamentally different from the causal explanatory approach of the natural sciences. This paper critically examines this claim and advocates an alternative, explicitly naturalistic and empiricist outlook at human action, exemplified, in particular, by the research program of evolutionary psychology. It is argued that, within the Austrian tradition, a decidedly naturalistic approach to subjectivism can be found in F. A. Hayek’s work.

Purpose – To show the existence of two different lines of thought in economics: the Homo oeconomicus tradition and the evolutionary tradition.

Methodology/approach – Following Hayek, the author adopts the individualistic methodology. This allows to separate the Homo oeconomicus approach, which is a hyper-rationalistic construction concerned with the intentional results of human action, from the evolutionary approach, which is concerned with the unintended consequences of human conduct.

Findings – The Homo oeconomicus tradition incurs the methodological mistake of psychologism, a theory of human nature and a human psychology as they exist prior to society. And yet the nature of individual man itself must be placed within a social context and be explained. As the evolutionary tradition and Hayek suggest, the formation of the Ego and the development of the human mind moves over a range of intersubjective relations.

Research limitations/implications – Homo oeconomicus tries to maximize the result of human conduct. However, the concept of maximization neglects the fact that the exchange occurs as soon as a positive-sum game sets in; this is very different from maximization, which does not take into account the ‘compensations’ that the subject can achieve by means of the other dimensions of human action.

Originality/value of paper – To speak of ‘classical economists’, placing evolutionary scholars and strictly utilitarian ones under the same denomination is just as misleading as using the expression ‘neoclassical economists’ in referring to the evolutionary Menger and utilitarian Jevons and Walras.

After a clarification of definitions important in methodological discussions, a brief history of early methodological thought in economics and political economy is presented. The development of “orthodox” methodology is traced, and the fundamental assumptions underlying neoclassical economic methodology are enumerated. Philosophical positions – both critical of and sympathetic to the orthodox assumptions – are presented. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of various heterodox positions are surveyed. Throughout the paper, methodological justifications for the emphasis on primarily deductive, complex mathematical models in contemporary economics as practiced in the USA – especially in light of the relevance and importance of primarily verbal, interpretive methodologies in the realm of applied and policy‐oriented economics – are examined.

This paper applies the logic of economic calculation to the actions of autocrats. We model autocrats as stationary bandits who use profit-and-loss calculations to select institutions that maximize their extraction rents. We find in many cases autocrats achieve rent maximization through creating and protecting private property rights. This in turn yields high levels of production, with expropriation kept low enough to incentivize continued high production. Importantly, while this leads to increasing quantities of available goods and services over time, it does not lead to true development; that is, the coordination of consumer demand with producer supply through directing resources to their highest-valued uses. We apply our model to the authoritarian governments of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, showing how they function as quasi-corporate governance organizations in the business of maximizing appropriable rents.

The Austrian school developed a specific kind of economic analysis. Mises′ place in this school of thought and his praxeological point of view is discussed. His philosophical stance and its methodological implications are then considered.