Markets and Metis: Reading Hayek with Scott

This paper by Mark Pennington draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek to understand threats to personal and enterprise freedom, arising from public health governance.

This article is the first to draw together systematically Ostrom’s reflections about ontological issues and to identify what Ostrom saw as their implications for the appropriate methods for analysing and explaining the possibility of self-governance. In doing so, the paper also contributes to the growing literature on ontology and the history of economic thought.

Read Here Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets Author: Eric Alston Published in Journal of Law, Technology …

This paper draws on Hayek’s distinction between simple and complex phenomena to understand the nature of the challenge facing policymakers in responding to the new coronavirus pandemic. It shows that while government action is justifiable there may be few systemic mechanisms that enable policymakers to distinguish better from worse policy responses, or to make such distinctions in sufficient time.

This paper focuses on the informal occupation of public housing in Naples (Italy), analysing the fraudulent takeover of housing units. An in-depth look at this case study contributes to the international debate on the nexus between urban informality and the state, showing the fundamental, multifaceted role of public institutions in shaping the illegal city.

James M. Buchanan cited the American Founding as an important inspiration for his constitutional vision. His insistence on unanimous constitutional agreement highlights the fact that the Constitutional Convention did not obtain the consent of the black Americans. Accordingly, Buchanan’s work leads to an appreciation of the Founders as an archetype of the constitutional mentality that he advocated throughout his work, but also to an understanding that the Founding fell short of his ideal of genuinely consensual politics.

The innovation systems (IS) approach—developed by Richard Nelson, Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Ake Lundvall, amongst others—has become perhaps the dominant approach in the academic literature for the study of innovation. This paper argues that the work of Friedrich Hayek and Elinor Ostrom can be used to draw attention to some potential difficulties with the way in which the IS approach is often used to guide policy.

How does cultural diversity affect social organization? Do institutional differences between diverse and homogeneous communities have implications for economic development? This paper argues that heterogeneity not only impedes informal mechanisms of cooperation, but also increases demand for formal institutions. Greater reliance on formal law and public authority, in turn, facilitates economic development by enabling arm’s length transactions and encouraging entrepreneurship.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity?

Read Here Steering, Knowledge and the Challenge of Governance Evaluation: The Case of National Health Service Governance and Reform in …

Building upon recent work on epistemic varieties of liberalism, avant-garde political agency and the theory and practice of activism, I claim that a liberal defence of more open borders does not presuppose either indifference to the problem of the deep structural sources of poverty in poorer countries, or the absence of an account of those structures’ transformation.

Read Here Local Energy Communities and Distributed Generation: Contrasting Perspectives, and Inevitable Policy Trade-Offs, beyond the Apparent Global Consensus Author: …