F. A. HAYEK: ECONOMICS, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

摘要

The profession of economics is rent in two: the mainstream majority and the Austrian minority. Mainstream economists increasingly rely on formal modelling and econometric testing. Austrian School economists shun mathematics, prefer verbal deduction, and assert the superiority of completely free markets. In this book on Hayek, Peter Boettke goes beyond the mere description of this rift and tries to understand and solve the theoretical differences that separate the two schools. Under the guidance of Hayek he tries to show that mainstream economists start from an assumption that greatly limits their ability to explain society, its origins, its functioning, and its future. That assumption is that economic analysis must start from the regulating ideal of perfect competition equilibrium, with its attendant perfect knowledge, perfect divisibility of factors, and perfect discrimination of goods; and it can then proceed to examine the modification of these ideal conditions in reality and so study the imperfections of actual markets. Boettke, conversant as he is with both mainstream and Austrian economics, convincingly argues that Hayek took a better path, one that moved away from the notion of perfectly competitive equilibrium to present an evolutionary conception of the economy.