I wanted to expound a bit on one of Dr Boettke’s recent posts which attributed economic calculation as the critical contribution of the Austrian School. In Boettke’s publication on economic calculation he lays out his position in the great homogenization debate which has rifted scholars between allegedly Misesian and Hayekian lines. In addition to the role of economic calculation as a case for homogenizing Mises and Hayek’s contributions on socialist calculation, Dr. Boettke makes an additional point which has gone more unnoticed in the calculation v. knowledge squabbles of the internal Austrian circles. The second case for homogenization that Boettke makes draws on a notion from post-modernism (relax, it’s not without caveat). His point is that to truly understand the message behind an author’s work it is helpful to recognize the context in which he is writing. Boettke says the following succinctly, “Mises wrote to a wider audience and for the ages, Hayek wrote for a particular time and place and to a narrow specialist audience.” Probably more unnoticed is the footnote to this quotations which says the following:

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I edited and posted my comments of Vincent Ostrom’s “The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies,” on Amazon.com.
Link to review of Ostrom.
Link to all of my reviews.

If you don’t know about the convenient internet resource, technorati, the world must be passing you by. All you do is plug in your site’s (or any site’s) URL and you can see who has linked to it recently in the blogosphere. So here are the results for:
Austrian Addiction
and
The MISEScreants
I’m posting these links as a way to show thanks for linking to me and a quick easy way to link back.

I was rummaging through some old hard drive space and came across a book summary I had co-authoerd for a class on Constitutional Law in undergrad. I posted it on amazon as a book review and can be read here.

I recently read Vincent Ostrom’s The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies for Pete’s Constitutional Political Economy Class. He wrote up a comment on the Austrian Economists.
I would like to comment on a feature of Vincent Ostrom’s proposed research design for the investigation into political economy. As it has been explained to me the Ostroms (both Vincent and Elinore) assert that the proper structure of intensive education in political economy is one of artisanship over repetitions and reiteration. Graduate students learn best by doing and should view their degree seeking years more as apprenticeships in which they hone the tools and skills of their craft.

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