Dynamist Blog

HAYEK, EVOLUTION, & ECONOMICS

Greg Ransom, whose Hayek Center site is a one-stop online shop for information on the work of F.A. Hayek, now has a Hayek-oriented blog called PrestoPundit.com. It's well worth a visit.

Greg is wrong, however, that economics is not about individual behavior. Sometimes it is. Here's a somewhat trivial example. The broader point, which Paul Krugman makes in an article on evolution and economics analyzed by Jason Soon, is simply that economics is about individual human action, not impersonal forces--a concept as central to Austrian economists like Hayek as to neoclassical economists like Krugman.

The relation between evolutionary theory and economics is quite tricky. Joel Mokyr tells me he left out a whole book's worth on the subject when he published his terrific Gifts of Athena, which I wrote about here. I hope Joel eventually turns his careful thinking on the subject into another book.

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