This essay is a keynote address prepared for a conference on "Entangled Political Economy" sponsored by the Wirth Institute. In keeping with the conventions of such an address, I look both backward and forward while placing more emphasis on looking forward. In looking backward, I compare and...

Frank Knight famously remarked nearly a century ago that the primary problems that stem from societal living together do not arise because of what we don’t know but rather arise because of what we know that isn’t true. This paper pursues Knight’s theme by incorporating three elements into...

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...

Game theory holds out the promise of transforming the core of economic theory from ascience of rational choice into a science of human interaction. While traditional gametheory does open into social interaction, it mostly neglects another central feature ofeconomic intuition: spontaneous...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal...

With respect to ordering different fields of scholarly inquiry, ethics is commonly thought to be independent of economics, and, moreover, with ethical principles standing in judgment of economizing actions. In contrast, we explore a line of thought where ethics, politics, and commerce all emerge...