It appears in the forthcoming issue of Critical Review. for now, all the papers except Jeffrey Friedman’s are gated. In the symposium, Karen L. Vaughn writes,
While Hayek overtly focused on the price system as the means of achieving economic coordination, in fact, prices will only do their work if the complex of market institutions within which action takes place is relatively stable. The coordination problem is solved by both the price system and the complex of rules, practices, and routines that characterize the market order. Moreover, the market order evolves over time as people find better “solutions” to their problems.
This seems to me to anticipate George Gilder’s description of high-information entrepreneurial activity occurring within a low-information channel of rules and regular behavior.
the relative lengthiness of the capital structure in growth years, and the relative shortness of the capital structure in recessions, does not mean that it is too long during growth years and just right during the recession (as Hayek theorized). It may be the case that it is just right during growth years and too short during the recession.
[Hayek] realized that, just as constraints on freedom of expression limit our search for the truth, constraints on freedom of action do so as well. In fact, limiting freedom of action can lead to long-term reductions in human well-being insofar as innovation is necessarily based on the cognitive rewiring that takes place from encountering specific new situations.
In short, people learn from experiences that contradict their preconceptions, and limiting their experiences means limiting their ability to learn.
The growth of public-sector employment and bureaucratic private corporations has meant that most individuals, including Hayek himself, have been security-seeking employees, rather than risk-taking market entrepreneurs. As Hayek noted, a nation of employees is likely to be averse to risk and prone to seek safety, valuing security more than enterprise
Peter J. Boettke and Kyle W. O’Donnell write,
Given the impenetrable shroud of time and ignorance, trial-and-error experimentation through the competitive market process is among the only established methods for assessing the value to society of alternative courses of action. The effectiveness of this trial-and-error method is analogous to the theory of biological evolution by natural selection
Jeffrey Friedman writes (not gated),
the adaptive aspect of Hayek’s approach to interpretation can explain erroneous interpretations without invoking irrationality (as is so often done by social scientists, especially economists). Hayek’s explanation for error juxtaposes the wider objective world against expectations that we form on the basis of local objective conditions (as reflected by the stimuli we notice)…Hayek’s account of learning describes the correction of our subjective interpretations by further experience with the objective environment.
…we can be sure that everyone has what they view as good reasons for their beliefs, even when these beliefs seem, to us, to be obviously mistaken.
Friedman goes on to say that Hayek mis-speaks when he talks about local “knowledge” rather than local opinion. Read the entire essay.