It is well known that Friedrich Hayek once rejoiced at Noam Chomsky’s evolutionary theory of language, which stated that the faculty of speaking depends upon a biological device which human beings are enabled with. There is no blank slate and our experience of the world relies on structures that come from the experience in itself. … Continue reading Deep Learning and Abstract Orders
What Friedrich A. Hayek sought with his three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty was to propose a legal-political system in which the Rule of Law principle would not be de facto replaced by the rule of men through laws (Rule by Law). To do this, he built a recursive model of a legal system whose initial conditions were the … Continue reading Hayek, or the Recursive Model of the Rule of Law
We live in times in which the liberal democracy is challenged by a sort of political meritocracy according to which a performance legitimacy — i.e., the utility that government management brings to the population – would be more important than the legitimacy of origin, based on the consent of the sovereign people. Thus, economic growth … Continue reading Some Reflections on Liberal Democracy, Political Meritocracy, and Critical Rationalism
It is only from a notion of the human, common to all men, that the concept of person can be dissolved into the idea of individual. The relevance of the concept of person lies in its ability to describe functional relationships with its environment: sui juris or alieni juris, noble, patrician, commoner, serf or lord, … Continue reading On Persons, Individuals, and Humans
Just as language carries with it a phenomenon of open texture, according to which the reference and meaning of some of its terms are modified in response to changes in the environment — for example, saying that the head of state is commander in chief of the armed forces implies different denotations and connotations as … Continue reading On the open texture of conflicts
In a brief autobiographical note, Friedrich Hayek refers to the influence he had received in his younger years from both his teacher Ernst Mach and his distant cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein: “But I did, through these connexions, become probably one of the first readers of Tractatus when it appeared in 1922. Since, like most philosophically interested … Continue reading A few words — and many quotations – about the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Friedrich Hayek
In 1945, Friedrich A. Hayek published under the title “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in The American Economic Review, one of his most celebrated essays -both at the time of its appearance and today- and probably, together with other studies also later compiled in the volume Individualism and Economic Order (1948), one of those … Continue reading Some derivations from the uses of the terms “knowledge” and “information” in F. A. Hayek’s works.
In the first volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), we will find the most daring theses of Friedrich Hayek regarding the problem between law and politics. Just as his economic work of the 1930s and 1940s had been, in his opinion, misunderstood by his colleagues; just as he was surprised to hear the fervent … Continue reading A Note on “Hayekian” Empirical Normative Systems
However, theorizing about law enforcement takes on vital importance when it comes to considering whether a low level of law enforcement denatures the Rule of Law in such a way that it implies, de facto, a change of regime. That is, when it happens that, under the shell of a constitutional system, an increasingly authoritarian … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 10 of 12)
Different degrees of law enforcement Law enforcement systems range from ideal types of pure blind and automatic rule enforcement to pure discretion. The ideal of automatic law enforcement denies the reality of errors, the fragmentation of knowledge of special circumstances of time and place, and information costs. Meanwhile, complete discretion is the very negation of … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 4 of 12)
This essay aims to highlight that the low generalized application of positive legal norms in any legal system, by allowing greater discretion on the part of the public powers, leads to a gradual increase in the levels of authoritarianism, both on the part of governments and of society itself.
Recently, I came across this outstanding interview with Eugene Fama published by The Market / NZZ. Besides the main subject discussed -the inability of central banks to control inflation-, the interview is intertwined with gripping assertions about the limits of knowledge, such as the following ones: Bubbles are things people see in hindsight. They don’t … Continue reading Efficient markets as normative systems
In the year 2020, occidental democracies face a time of lock-downs, social distancing, and a sort of central planning based on epidemiological models fueled by testing methodologies. An almost uniform consensus on the policy of “flattening the curve and raising the line” spread worldwide, both in the realms of politics and science. Since the said … Continue reading A Reflection on Information and Complex Social Orders
The advocates of the sunk cost fallacy state that, since an agent ponders in his decisions marginal costs against marginal incomes, any consideration upon sunk costs would be irrational. Notwithstanding, as soon as we accept the arguments of the said sunk cost fallacy and try to put its recommendations into practice, we discover that we … Continue reading There is no such thing as a sunk cost fallacy
Institutions, whether formal or informal, consist of limitations on behaviour that allow structuring an order of human interaction (North, D.C., 1991). Such institutions endow decisions with their agents of transitivity and, consequently, with rationality and predictability. That is to say, an institution allows to conform expectations on a range of events dependent on individual decisions … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 9); Conclusion: legal-political institutions and systems
Notes On Liberty 