Emergent cognitive order
As I've mentioned here before, I'm conflicted about Austrian economics. While I disagree strongly with most of its political conclusions, I think it asks many of the right questions - especially in its seminal works, such as von Mises' On Human Action . Pete Boettke in this post shows that, despite being surprisingly wedded to a narrow, libertarian strand of political opinion, the Austrian movement is still interested in much bigger and more intriguing questions than what the right level of taxes is. His colleague Virgil Storr has been appointed editor of the journal Studies in Emergent Order . Let me use this opportunity to briefly mention some of my ideas in this area, placing a marker for future, deeper exploration of them. First: the notion of emergent order is critical to economics. The high level behaviours and structures of many complex systems arise from low-level components that apparently have little in common with them. The human brain is perhaps the cano...