The paper offers a number of vignettes surrounding Friedrich A. Hayek’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. It examines Hayek’s life before he got the prize, describes the events in Stockholm, and offers a summary of the main themes of his Prize Lecture. It then examines the subsequent impact on Hayek’s life and career. It concludes… Read more »
Indignation is often understood to be the translation of an essentially just moral evaluation. However, it is necessary to investigate the ambiguities of this moral emotion. In the first part, an examination of the genealogy of indignation sheds light on the differences and similarities between ancient and modern conceptions of indignation. Modern indignation presupposes a… Read more »
« La construction genrée des affects politiques entre action et passion », chapitre d’ouvrage, in La politique à l’épreuve des émotions politiques, Alain Faure et Emmanuel Négrier (dir.), Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. « Res Publica », 2017, pp. 231-239. See more here.
Aristotle listed moderation as one of the moral virtues. He also defined virtue as the mean between extremes, implying that moderation plays a vital role in all forms of moral excellence. But moderation’s protean character—its vague and ill-defined omnipresence in judgment and action—makes it exceedingly difficult to grasp theoretically. At the same time, moderation seems… Read more »
This paper investigates the industrial organization of the international drug trade. From the mid 1970s through the early 2000s, a few large-scale and hierarchically organized cartels dominated the market. Since 2006, dozens of smaller and more-specialized units have emerged. We notice that the prohibition efforts of federal governments (primarily Mexico and the U.S.) imposed costs… Read more »
We develop a framework for understanding how legal structures relate to imprisonment. We hypothesize that relatively more hierarchy within criminal justice institutions, compared to commercial law, fosters higher rates of incarceration. Our framework predicts that incarceration reflects asymmetric opportunities for rent seeking across differently organized legal institutions. Instead of comparing criminal justice institutions across nations… Read more »
Standard economic theory proposes that public goods (equally available to everyone) will be underprovided by private markets. Individuals can benefit without having to pay, so there is little incentive to invest or manage resources efficiently. The punishment of criminals is an example of this, since everyone in a society benefits from reduced crime whether they… Read more »
This book argues that the work of the Austrian economists, including Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been too narrowly interpreted. Through a study of Viennese politics and culture, it demonstrates that the project they were engaged in was much broader: the study and defense of a liberal civilization. Erwin… Read more »