Spring 2012 Term Starts Today at GMU

|Peter Boettke|

I am always excited to get back to school.  This term I am teaching two graduate courses --- Econ 828 -- Constitutional Economics, which is basically a course in social and political philosophy for economists --- and Econ 895 -- Advanced Topics in Austrian Economics --- which is the third course available to PhD students, and we are focusing on the themes of creativity, complexity and coordination.

Here are the respective syllabi for Econ 828 and Econ 895.  

For 828, we begin the course discussing the relationship between public finance, public choice, and political economy and social philosophy.  I highly recommend to all who care about these issues to read the book Public Finance and Public Choice, which contains contrasting lecture transcripts from Richard Musgrave and James Buchanan.  It really sets up the reasons why political economists must cross over from the field of public finance/public economics, to the field of political philosophy before coming back again to provide reasonable answers to questions about the scale and scope of government from an economic point of view.

Given the purpose of 895, and the background of the students, there is a supplemental reading list that will serve as the basis for possible arbitrage opportunities within the journals: 

DATE	TOPIC	READING
January 24	Change Within Permanence: Why Austrian Economics Matters for the Science of Economics	Kirman, “The Intrinsic Limits of Economics” (1989)
January 31	Opacity and Human Action: The Future is Unknowable But Not Unimaginable	Coddington, “Creaking Semaphor and Beyond” (1975) Samuelson, “Modeling Knowledge in Economic Analysis” (2004)
Feb 7	Rationality and All That	Anand, “The Philosophy of Intransitive Preferences” (1993) Gode and Sunder, “Allocative Efficiency of Markets with Zero-Intelligence Traders” (1993)
Feb 14	The Marvel of the Market	Fisher, “Stability, Disequilibrium Awareness, and the Perception of New Opportunities” (1981) Gode and Sunder, “What Makes Markets Allocationally Efficient?” (1997)
Feb 21	Beyond Magical Markets	Makowski and Ostroy, “Perfect Competition and the Creativity of the Market” (2001) Axtel, “The Complexity of Exchange” (2005)
Feb 28	Studying Human Action Once More	Koppl, “Rational Choice Hermeneutics” (2004) Samuelson, “Foundations of Human Sociality: A Review Essay” (2005)
March 6	Analytical History as Social Science	Elster, “Rational Choice History: A Case of Excessive Ambition,” (2000) Bates, et al, “The Analytic Narrative Project” (2000)
March 13	SPRING BREAK	SPRING BREAK
March 20	The Theory of Complex Phenomena	Rosser, “On the Complexities of Economic Dynamics” (1999) Durlauf, “Complexity and Empirical Economics” (2005)
March 27	Institutional Diversity and Social Cooperation	Ostrom, “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action” (1997) Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States” (2010)
April 3	APEE	APEE
April 10	Heterogeneity, Multiple Specificity and Economic Calculation	Dixit, “Investment and Hysteresis” (1992) MacLeod, “Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement” (2007)
April 17	On the Manipulation of Money and Credit	Selgin, et al, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?” (2012) Diamond and Rajan, “Illiquid Banks, Financial Stability, and Interest Rate Policy” (2011)
April 24	Robust Political Economy	Acemoglu, “Constitutions, Politics, and Economics,” (2005) Rauch, “Getting the Properties Right to Secure Property Rights” (2005)
May 1	Creativity, Complexity and Coordination	Markose, “Computability and Evolutionary Complexity” (2005) Koppl, “Thinking Impossible Things” (2008)

 

Also, I am the director of the Workshop in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, which starts this Friday. The PPE workshop serves as the center piece of our weekly research activities for those of us interested in Ausrian economics, political economy, and classical liberalism, and has been in continuous operation since I moved to GMU in 1998.   If you are visiting the DC area and are interested in attending, please contact me at [email protected] to double check about time, place and availability.

 

Comments

[Roger Koppl]

Great choice of topics, Pete.