Abigail Devereaux joins host Cory Massimino on Mutual Exchange Radio to discuss the connections between complexity economics, systems theory, emergent order, science fiction, and more. Dr. Abigail Devereaux is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Economic Growth and Assistant Professor of Economics at Wichita State University. She’s also affiliated with the…

In this episode of MER, Alex McHugh interview Gus diZerega on his work around democracy as a spontaneous order. Gus is a retired professor with a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is now an independent scholar and has been involved in an ongoing back and forth on libertarianism with…

This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities….

The first thing I saw on Twitter this morning, when I sat down with my coffee, was Allison Kilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) linking to a David Edwards piece at RawStory with the remarkably asinine comment “‘Spontaneous order’ is not a thing, libertarians.” The article (“Fox host: FEMA is unnecessary because Walmart will ‘spontaneously’ save us all in…

Recently, a law was passed in California that redefines how sexual relations happen on college campuses. The law states that affirmative consent must be given throughout sex. Past relationships between the two individuals cannot be taken as consent and neither can consent be presumed when people are incapacitated from drugs or alcohol, unable to communicate, or…

According to Damon Linker, spontaneous order “might be the silliest and most harmful of all” libertarian ideas (“Libertarianism’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea,” The Week, Sept. 26). He summarizes spontaneous order, popularized by Hayek in the 20th century, as the belief that “when groups of individuals are left alone, without government oversight or…

Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie defends the Hayekian “spontaneous order” idea from Damon Linker thusly: An obvious example of spontaneous order from the contemporary moment isn’t Iraq or Libya but something like the way Uber operates vis a vis traditional taxi cartels. I happen to be with Gillespie versus Linker, but I think the idea…