Carl Menger’s objective in his seminal book, Principles of Economics, was to elucidate a unified account of price formation. This raises a question, which motivates our paper: to what extent, if any, can Menger account for production not directly organized by the price mechanism, and therefore...

This paper reconceptualizes and unbundles the relationship between public predation, state capacity, and economic development from a constitutional perspective. By reframing our understanding of state capacity theory from a constitutional perspective, we argue that to the extent there is a...

This paper evaluates the contribution of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit to the development ofeconomic theory in the 20th century. Our argument in this paper is twofold. First, we contend thatthis book embodied what had been the common knowledge of early neoclassical economics priorto WWII....

This paper explores the intellectual context of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during the 1930s. we will be focusing on the contributions of F.A. Hayek, along with Lionel Robbins, in fostering an intellectual environment for the...

What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are...

Technological advances associated with computing power and the prospect of artificial intelligence have renewed interest on the economic feasibility of socialism. The question of such feasibility turns on whether or not the problem of economic calculation has fundamentally changed. In spite of...

The articles collected in the three-volume set of Chicago Price Theory illustrate elements of continuity and change in the development of the Chicago School. Its editors stress a continuity in price theory at Chicago that runs from Frank Knight to Gary Becker. Our main contribution in this...

This essay praises Gerald Gaus's The Order of Public Reason as a building block for all normative explorations into the institutional foundations of human sociability. It evaluates the normative implications put forth by Gaus in terms of the Kirzner's “finder's keeper's ethic.” This raises a...

According to Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (2013, p. 123), Mises’s critique of economic calculation under socialism renders him the originator of the economic analysis of property rights. This paper also suggests that implicit to Mises’s impossibility theorem was also the origins of the...