The Virginia School of Economics

• John Vandivier
  1. Apply ideas outside of political economy to entrepreneurship, business analysis, firm organization, and market and industrial organization in general and in particular. I'm also haven't read much international work from him, but maybe it's out there and I haven't seen it.
  2. Synthesize and model Austrian and Knightian concepts of uncertainty, if they aren't already synonymous.
  3. Account for the Austrian concept of alertness. Perhaps this could be done by constructing search costs as a function of market prices and heterogeneous individual-level search productivity, where the latter is equivalent to alertness.
  4. Account for invention, not just entrepeneurship-as-equilibrating.
  5. There are some things which might already be included but can be added to the checklist anyway: Heterogenous capital, labor, and everything else, tacit and local knowledge,
  6. Perhaps reconcile revealed preference with demonstrated preference, or utilitarian mechanics with Austrian principles of ordinal preference rankings. Bryan Caplan has argued that the Neoclassical approach to utility-oriented calculation is compatible with Austrian requirements on ordinal preferences due to the way utility functions are robust to certain transformations.
    1. Caplan, like Joe Solerno, seems friendly to the dehomogenized view of Mises and Hayek, in contrast to Boettke.
    2. Caplan has indicated Austrian economics a la Hayek may be reconciled with Neoclassical economics, stating, \"If Mises and Rothbard are right, then modern neoclassical economics is wrong; but if Hayek is right, then mainstream economics merely needs to adjust its focus.\"