From Vienna to Virginia: Exchange, rules, and socialcooperation an introduction to the symposium

Geoffrey S. Lea & Adam G. Martin

Published online: 10 October 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract Serving as an introduction to the essays in this volume, we put forward anintellectual hardcore for a shared research agenda between Austrian and Virginiapolitical economy. This research agenda rests on three pillars: exchange, rules, andsocial cooperation. Each of these pillars forms the distinctive flavor of Austrian andVirginian political economy with respect to theoretical approach, types and applica-tions of empirics, and even to normative questions. Our essay explores the meaningof these pillars with respect to the broader study of political economy, as well as theintellectual superstructure of each respective school.

Keywords Exchange . Social cooperation . Virginia school . Constitutional politicaleconomy

JEL codes B25 . B41 . B53 . P16

1 From Vienna to Virginia: exchange, rules, and social cooperation

The connections between the modern Austrian school of economics and the Virginiaschool of political economy are extensive and thick. To those with but a cursoryfamiliarity with the two schools of thought, their common ground may seem to beprimarily ideological. The chief thinkers of the two schools evince an unmistakablyclassical liberal orientation. But there are deeper, foundational links—biographical,organizational, and intellectual—between the two schools.

Rev Austrian Econ (2014) 27:1–9DOI 10.1007/s11138-013-0240-x

G. S. Lea (*)Department of Economics, University of Illinois Springfield, One University Plaza,MS UHB 4049, Springfield, IL 62703-5407, USAe-mail: glea2@uis.edu

A. G. MartinDepartment of Political Economy, King’s College London, 22 Kingsway,Strand Campus, London, UK WC2B 6NRe-mail: adam.martin@kcl.ac.uk

The organizational and biographical connections are too numerous to recount indetail here. Gordon Tullock credits his discovery of Human Action in a Yale Universitybookstore as precipitating his interest in applying the economic way of thinking to thebureaucracy he encountered in the State Department. Hayek was one of the first visitorsto Buchanan and Nutter’s Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy atthe University of Virginia. Leland Yeager, also at UVA, introduced a great manystudents to Austrian ideas. Organizational ties between the two schools of thought runthrough the William Volker Fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Institute for Humane Studies,and frequent meetings between Austrians and Virginians through Liberty Fundcolloquia. In more recent years, both Buchanan and Tullock’s Public Choice Centerand the only formal American graduate program in Austrian economics have beenlocated at George Mason University (see Wagner 2004). These connections in time andplace illuminate the trajectory of both schools of thought but they are not our focus here.

The remainder of this essay categorizes the core intellectual connections, what wecall the “three pillars” of a shared Austro-Virginian research paradigm: exchange,rules, and social cooperation. Each pillar is a core concept foundational to theoreticalinquiry, empirical investigation, and even normative analysis.

These three pillars are not the most obvious choices for foundational concepts in moderneconomics; concepts like scarcity, opportunity cost, and incentives aremore likely candidates.But those latter concepts are common to all rational choice schools of thought, including boththe Austrian and Virginia schools, whereas the three pillars of exchange, rules, and socialcooperation denote the distinctive overlap betweenVienna andVirginia. Likewise, wewouldnot go so far as to suggest that the three pillars exhaust the distinctiveness of either school. Asmutually reinforcing concepts, though, they create a shared space for a unique and fruitfulresearch paradigm. The essays collected here aptly testify to that fertility.

This symposium collects articles questioning, examining, and building on thetheoretical common ground between the Austrian and Virginia schools. These articlesgrew out of the “From Vienna to Virginia” conference held at the Foundation forEconomic Education’s Irvington headquarters in September, 2008. The conferencebrought together young scholars—graduate students and untenured faculty—withsenior scholars whose work represents a mix of both schools. Some of the papersin this symposium were presented at the conference, while others are includedbecause they are located in the Vienna-Virginia intersection.

2 Exchange

Vienna and Virginia’s shared emphasis on the primacy of exchange constitutes aparadigmatic approach to both economic theorizing and political economy.1 Mises(1949) defined economics proper—as opposed to the broader field of praxeology—ascatallactics, or the science of exchange. James Buchanan’s 1964 piece “What ShouldEconomists Do?” proffers the classic statement of this paradigm. In it, Buchanantakes issue with the dominant Robbinsian definition of economics as studyingproblems of scarce resource allocation. This definition omits, Buchanan notes, any

1 For further elaboration, the reader is directed to the alternative, the value paradigm, as laid out in Kohn(2004) and further explicated in Kohn (2007) and Wagner (2007b).

2 G.S. Lea, A.G. Martin

commitment to stating who is doing the allocating, thus leaving the door open toconceptually collapsing several individual ends into social welfare and imbuinginteraction with a false sense of teleology (Buchanan 1964). Taking this concernseriously means finding non-teleological ways of thinking to understand interaction(rules) and of normatively evaluate it (social cooperation), which are taken up below.

In one sense the exchange paradigm simply embodies a firm commitment to meth-odological individualism and subjectivism, since it strictly limits purpose and choice tothe individual level and eschews aggregation. In another sense, however, the exchangeparadigm makes room for distinctively social phenomena by insisting on the irreduc-ibility of interaction to individual action. The analysis of exchange is not exhausted bythe analysis of allocation and choice. In Austrian terms, praxeology is necessary but notsufficient for the analysis of exchange. Buchanan’s dispute with Kenneth Arrow over theimpossibility of aggregating individual preferences into a social welfare function revealsthis dual function of the exchange paradigm: on the one hand it is foolish to seek aftersocial ends, but on the other hand it is foolish to judge majority rule decision making bythe standards of individual rationality (Buchanan 1954).

Interaction introduces a variety of concerns that are irreducible to allocation: thepossibility of deep heterogeneity of preferences and expectations, the difficulties of coor-dinating the division of knowledge, and the emergence of phenomena that are the results ofhuman action but not of human design. Deep heterogeneity shines through in the VirginiaSchool’s approach to public finance, which argues (against orthodox public finance) thatthe incentives of public choosers define the size of the debt and the distribution of its burdenand (against New Classical macroeconomists) that heterogeneity among those chooserspermits genuine fiscal disorder (Buchanan 1958, 1967; Brennan and Buchanan 1980).

Heterogeneity plays directly into the division of knowledge, a hallmark concept of theAustrian school that comes to the forefront in the socialist calculation debate. Mises (1920)argues that problems of household management are different in kind from the buying andselling of higher order goods and services, a distinction from Menger (1871) that is itselfdefined in terms of exchange relationships. Similarly, Hayek (1973) makes a crucialmethodological point in the later stages of the debate about the incommensurability ofindividual equilibrium and genuine plan coordination across individuals. These insights areeventually folded into market process theory (see Kirzner 1997). While the developers ofthis approach rarely call explicit attention to the distinctive elements of exchange, none of thesignature characteristics of the market process approach makes sense if exchange isreducible to individual action. The division of knowledge also rears its head in VirginiaPolitical Economy, most notably in Tullock’s theory of knowledge flows in bureaucraticorganizations (Tullock 1965).

Finally, it is difficult to imagine a theory of spontaneous order outside of the exchangeparadigm. To say that problems of interaction are in principle reducible to problems ofindividual action is to imply that all forms of orderly interaction can be understood as theresult of conscious organization (see Hayek 1973). It is probably no coincidence that, ofthe three famous marginal revolutionaries, it was Menger—not relying on perfectlyinformed traders or an externalWalrasian auctioneer—whowrote about the spontaneousevolution of social institutions. And though the post-Marginal Revolution analysis ofspontaneous orders originates in Vienna (Menger 1871, 1883), the Virginia school hasstrong commitments to this idea as well. Buchanan’s (1982) short classic describes how“order [is] defined in the process of its emergence,” Roberts (1971) describes the

An introduction to the symposium 3

polycentric organization of the Soviet Union, and Wagner’s (2007a) work criticizescontemporary political economy models on the grounds that they analogize polities toorganizations rather than understanding them as spontaneous orders.

In this symposium, two of the essays stand out as highlighting the importance of theexchange nexus as the fundamental environment of economic action, making the importantpoint that the criterion of evaluation with a nexus of exchange is its ability to produceopportunities for exchange. Alexander Fink’s history of Swiss free banking illuminates thispoint wonderfully. He outlines how the actual evolution of free banking in 19th centurySwitzerland followed the process predicted by theory. Further he explains why it is best tounderstand these banking institutions in terms of the exchanges they helped to create, ratherthan comparing them to an idealized end-state of banking institutions. In a similar vein,David Howden turns his attention to the phenomenon of insider trading. He argues that thestandard approach of insider trading regulation creates incentives for outsiders to actfoolishly on information that insiders cannot legally disclose. If the nexus of exchange doesnot serve those parties seeking to exchange in the market, whom does it serve? Howden’sanswer is to apply public choice thinking and find beneficiaries of insider trading regulation.

3 Rules

In contemporary economics, virtually any discussion of rules commences with a curtsy oran outright bow to new institutional economics, and especially to the work of DouglassNorth (1990). But while contemporary Austrians and Virginians alike are also wont to citeNorth when discussing rules, it should be recognized that they were never absent fromeither school of thought. Indeed, rules have been a central and enduring feature of Austrianeconomics and Virginia Political Economy from the beginning.

Mises (1920) argues that the rules of private property are the defining feature of acapitalist economy that allows it to sustain an advanced division of labor through economiccalculation. Later Mises (1944) would analyze bureaucracy in terms of the absence of aresidual claimant. Hayek of course writes extensively on rules, beginning with his analysisof the rule of law in The Road to Serfdom (1944) and in more detail in The Constitution ofLiberty (1960) and the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973).

The emphasis on rules is even more pronounced in Virginia, where constitutionalpolitical economy is born. Recall that, in his debate with Arrow, Buchanan definesdemocratic institutions not in terms of a metaphysical aggregation of preferences but interms of majority selection of policies. Beginning with Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus ofConsent (1962), not only do political rules create the parameters for political interaction, theyalso are objects of potential agreement in the face of disagreement over policies. Thisapproach would take a more methodological, philosophical, and general approach yearslater in another Buchanan work coauthored with Geoffrey Brennan, The Reason of Rules(Brennan and Buchanan 1985). Tullock (1965) analyzes bureaucracy in terms of theincentives of hierarchical organizational structures. More recently, Wagner (2007a, 2012)has placed the distinctive “grammars” of common and private property at the heart of hisanalysis of fiscal phenomena and entangled political economy. A focus on rules, whetherpre- or post-constitutional, is the sine qua non of Virginia political economy.

The three implications of the exchange paradigm mentioned above—heterogeneity,the division of knowledge, and spontaneous order—all speak to the importance of rules

4 G.S. Lea, A.G. Martin

as a primary explanans of social science. Heterogeneity means that individuals haveincommensurable preferences, and spontaneous order by definition is the result ofindividuals pursuing several ends. The possibility of explaining the orderliness of socialinteractions in terms of shared purposes is thus severely constrained in the exchangeparadigm. Rules constitute the context within which individuals interact. To characterizea social sphere then is just to articulate the rules that define that sphere and (to a greateror lesser extent) trace out the consequences of interaction within those rules.

But the distinctive element of the Vienna-Virginia approach to rules stems from theproblem of the division of knowledge. For both schools of thought, there is an epistemicdimension to rules that is often neglected by other thinkers. The core argument ofHayek’s Constitution of Liberty is a defense of the rules constituting a liberal order forenabling individuals to benefit from each others’ knowledge. Lachmann’s (1971)neglected treatment of institutions defines them not only as rules constraining behavior,but as “schemes of thought” that provide points of orientation allowing individuals withdisparate knowledge and expectations to coordinate their activities. On the Virginia side,Buchanan and Wagner (1977) put forward an argument that the rules of taxation ascommonly practiced tend to generate a “fiscal illusion” about the true costs of the state.

For both schools of thought, rules also provide a framework for normative policyevaluation. One of the guiding principles of Virginia Political Economy is is the mantra“rules not outcomes.” Instead of trying to plan outcomes, which are, after all, theemergent result of countless actions and interactions, the economist or policymakermay attempt to influence outcomes only by structuring the rules differently.

In this symposium Giampaolo Garzarelli and Matthew Holian work toward providinginsight into the problems of governance, both private and public. Their approach is toconsider both the standard method of analyzing incentive structures, as well as the rulesthat exist to create and disperse knowledge within these governance structures. Theirframework points to a more richly developed landscape of governance structures based onhow those structures work to accommodate knowledge problems to solved incentiveproblems or incentive problems to solved knowledge problems. Diana and MichaelThomas also contribute to the theme of rules, in their essay, by comparing the way inwhich entrepreneurial theory is employed in both Virginian and Austrian theorizing. Theynote that while the Kirznerian entrepreneur works to achieve greater levels of socialcooperation within a given set of market rules and institutions, political entrepreneurs donot equally benefit from the rule structures or feedback systems of the market. Instead,political entrepreneurship, properly understood, exists at the level of constitutional choicewhere actors influence outcomes by their ability to change rule sets. While every bit asimportant as Kirznerian entrepreneurs for understanding the market process, politicalentrepreneurs are not agents fully within a given institutional setting; on the contrary,political entrepreneurs produce the political process by their interactions at the pre- andpost-constitutional levels.

4 Social cooperation

The last of the pillars of this shared research program is a commitment to theimportance of social cooperation. Social cooperation serves as both the motivatingquestion and a primary solution to myriad puzzles in political economy. It is the

An introduction to the symposium 5

solution insofar as it explains social order, both the genesis of this order and how itchanges through time. The concept also motivates the questions that political econ-omists ask: what allows for higher levels of social cooperation?

Social cooperation connects intimately with exchange and rules. The distinguishingcharacteristic of political economy motivated by social cooperation—as opposed toefficiency or utilitarian framing—is attentiveness to the several and heterogeneouscharacter of human purposes. Social cooperation becomes a motivating puzzle whenone sets aside any external weighting scheme for adjudicating differences in ends. Statedthusly, the exchange paradigm and a concern for social cooperation imply one anothersince incommensurable ends make social interaction different in kind from individualchoice. Rules engender social cooperation by enabling gains from exchange andimpeding gains from conflict.

Taking social cooperation as a starting point entails treating social order itself as apuzzle. How is it that individuals with incommensurable ends come to cooperate onsmall and large scales alike? Mises (1949, Chapter 8) most directly tackles thispuzzle, generalizing Ricardo’s law of comparative costs into the “Ricardian Law ofAssociation:” individuals with several ends cooperate to the extent that there arepossible gains from exchange. With a source of widespread social order identified,one can analyze its limitations. There are two obvious impediments to social ordergenerated by mutually beneficial exchange: the first is the possibility of conflict overscarce resources displacing specialization and trade, and the second is the possibilityof ignorance of mutually beneficial exchanges. The Austrian and Virginia schoolsalike have grappled with both problems, but the Virginia school’s theoretical ma-chinery more directly addresses the problem of conflict and the Austrian school’s theproblem of knowledge.

The Virginia school’s approach to understanding conflict emerged from the re-search program on anarchy at Virginia Polytechnic in the early 1970’s (Tullock 1972,1974a).2 Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty, written during this time, maps out the diffi-culties of initially establishing the rules of property that enable exchange andcooperation and constrain predation, as well as the possibility that such rules mightbreak down. Tullock’s (1974b) The Social Dilemma explores how states, normallythought of as institutions for mitigating conflict, can instead engender conflict.Buchanan’s essay “Rent Seeking and Profit Seeking” highlights the centrality ofrules in determining whether interactions are characterized by conflict or cooperation.He argues that the substantive difference between rent seeking and profit seekingbehavior is the institutional structure within which they take place. Profit seeking, byrelying on voluntary transactions and wealth generation, promotes social cooperation.Rent seeking, on the other hand, may be beneficial to social cooperation, neutral, oreven detrimental. Despite these differences in outcomes generated by differentinstitutional settings, behaviorally the two activities are isomorphic (Buchanan 1980).

The Austrian school has followed Mises’s emphasis on social cooperation byfocusing on knowledge and coordination. Beginning with the calculation debate, arecurring theme in Hayek’s writing is that markets enable individuals to benefit fromknowledge they themselves do not possess (Hayek 1945). Hayek’s writings on the

2 Stringham (2005) presents a re-evaluation of and challenge to this literature by a younger generation ofAustrian and public choice inspired economists.

6 G.S. Lea, A.G. Martin

division of knowledge, the extended order, the Great Society, catallaxy, and sponta-neous order stem from this puzzle, providing a framework for analyzing cooperationbetween individuals with not merely heterogeneous but even unknown ends. Socialcooperation emerges from the gains of dyadic exchange but is irreducible to them,since the division of knowledge in an extended order relies on indirect and anony-mous cooperation with multitudes. Following Hayek and Mises, central puzzle ofmarket process theory has been how markets coordinate cooperation on such a vastscale (Kirzner 1973, 1997; O'Driscoll 1977).

Kirzner goes so far as to suggest that plan coordination is a distinctive andindependent welfare standard for Austrian economics (Kirzner 2000). But morebroadly, social cooperation does not serve as an independent normative criteriondistinct from other moral theories. Rather, it is a broad principle and precondition forsocial order that must be addressed in order to satisfactorily apply those theories tothe big questions of political and social ethics. Thinkers in the two schools of thoughthave appended social cooperation, implicitly or explicitly, to a variety of ethicalapproaches. Hazlitt (1964) makes social cooperation the sine qua non of ethics itself,taking a rule utilitarian approach similar to Mises and Hayek (see also Yeager 2002).

Buchanan (1986) explicitly defends markets on deontological grounds. The ca-nonical Virginia school texts in constitutional political economy ask how politicalinstitutions could be designed such that states, like markets, operate by the principleof mutually beneficial exchange. The Calculus of Consent locates one solution in acontractarian modification of Wicksell’s unanimity principle, in which the rules of thepolitical game rather than individual policies are the relevant objects of consent, whilethe Politics by Principle, Not Interest identifies generality as the distinguishingcharacteristic of mutually beneficial rules (Buchanan and Congleton 1998). Buchan-an even argues that such a standard is applicable to the same person across time: sinceindividuals do not know their future preferences, rules that maximize personal libertyminimize the harm they do to their unknown future selves (Buchanan 1979).

In this symposium, three papers address the broader problems of social coopera-tion. Anthony Evans’s essay argues that, despite some similarities between the twoschools of thought, substantial if subtle differences characterize the foundations oftheir approaches. For Austrians, epistemic considerations have logical primacy overconsiderations of incentives, while the Virginia school, he claims, makes no suchbold departure from the standard incentives-first approach of economics. Publicchoice treats government agents as responsive to incentives in an ordinary sense.Adam Martin continues in some of the same vein, citing tensions between standard,incentives-first economics and the more epistemology-grounded approach shared inAustrian and Virginian political economy. He explores the landscape of standardefficiency criteria, located in mainstream economics and augmented by standardinterpretations of the Coase Theorem. In place of these, he proposes conceiving ofefficiency at the institutional level, insofar as different institutional structures willgenerate different knowledge problems, which he views as the ultimate source ofinefficiency. Lastly, Peter Boettke and Nicholas Snow present a research agendaspecifically catered to handle the concerns and problems of evolving political sys-tems. They propose that in place of the standard public choice school that shares itsVirginian roots with Chicagoan economics and a rational choice political science ofthe Rochester school, there be developed and explored an alternative public choice,

An introduction to the symposium 7

with those same Virginian roots but augmented instead with Austrian market processeconomics and the political science research program embodied by the Ostroms’Bloomington workshop.

5 Conclusion

The constellation of exchange, rules, and social cooperation as analytical points oforientation provides guidance for some of the toughest and most important questionsof political economy. It is our hope that the papers in this symposium outline thecontours of a vibrant and open-ended research program that combines the bestinsights of both the Austrian and Virginia schools and, more importantly, contributesnew insights regarding those questions.

We would also like to thank those that made this volume possible. First andforemost we would like to thank the paper authors for their hard work, as well asthe other participants at the conference. The original conference featured the work ofyoung scholars, with more senior scholars offering feedback and comments.3 Thepapers in this volume are better as a result. The Foundation for Economic Educationgenerously provided the facilities as well as both the financial and logistical supportfor the original symposium. In particular, the late Beth Hoffman, FEE’s managingeditor, provided both valuable administrative support and a warm and welcomepresence at the conference.

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