The appearance of a new collection of original essays considering the relevance of the writings of F. A. Hayek to behavioral economics can be greeted only with some degree of both anticipation and trepidation. If Hayek’s groundbreaking work in diverse fields is handled with analytical sophistication, any application to or examination from the perspective of behavioral economics is likely to be insightful. But, if one fails to comprehend the subtleties of Hayek’s often difficult ideas, a treatment of the latter through the lens of behavioral economics is likely to exacerbate misunderstanding. Luckily for Roger Frantz and Robert Leeson, co-editors of the anthology Hayek and Behavioral Economics, their several editorial missteps are mostly rectified by a coterie of attentive authors.

A number of the better essays in the collection, like the selection by Peter Boettke, W. Zachary Caceres, and Adam Martin, expose the fundamental error of any attempt to assimilate Hayekian economics to “new” behavioral economics: ^{Footnote 1} the former is not an instance but a critique of the latter. The central result of such behavioral analyses that real economic agents are not homos economicus is a premise in the Hayekian explanation of economic coordination: “Error is obvious. The puzzle is whether and to what extent human interaction generates institutions that cope with those errors and allow coordination” (p. 104). The new behavioral economics has little to say about this puzzle. Taiki Takahashi and Susumu Egashira make a similar argument in their fascinating and highly technical essay on Hayek’s cognitive psychology and its implications for a conceptual revolution in neuroeconomics. ^{Footnote 2}

Several of the collection’s more challenging, but ultimately rewarding, essays appear in the middle chapters of the book. Herbert Gintis offers an argument for the centrality to a reconceptualization of economics of Hayek’s theory of the role in guiding human behavior of (often implicit) social norms and cultural institutions. Ciara Chellini and Sonia Riva explicate the relationships between the psychological analyses of Hayek and the Swiss child-development psychologist Jean Piaget (to whom Hayek referred favorably in The Sensory Order [1952]). Francesco DiIorio’s deft comparative analysis of Hayek’s theoretical psychology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s neurophenomenology rationalizes Hayek’s allusion to similarities with the left-oriented French philosopher in 1976’s “The Primacy of the Abstract.” Leslie Marsh skillfully compares and contrasts Hayek’s “bidirectional” externalist explanation of complexity with Herbert Simon’s “unidirectional” account. And Stefano Fiori offers one of the best analyses to date in the secondary literature of the historical transition that led Hayek’s early criteria of demarcation between the natural and social sciences to become a distinction between sciences that investigate simple and complex phenomena.

This praise notwithstanding, all of it deserved, it is important to mention the apparent disinclination of the anthology’s editors to enforce certain standards and the undue denigration that Hayek suffers at the pens of a few of the collection’s authors.

Though published under the auspices of Palgrave Macmillan’s Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics series and despite the promise of “systematic archival examination,” a reader who picks up the book expecting to discover a wealth of archival research will be disappointed. A scan of the endnotes and bibliographies of the book’s fourteen essays reveals a total of two references (pages 194 and 215) to original archival research.

Moreover, one might argue that the book is mistitled. Only a few essays in the collection directly address the relevance of Hayek’s writings for behavioral economics and several repeat the same points: no fewer than five essays (those by co-editor Frantz, Marsh, Altman, Earl, and Rizzello and Spada) include extended comparisons and contrasts of Hayek and Herbert Simon. Two other essays in the anthology make no contact whatsoever with the issue of the relationship between Hayek’s writings and behavioral economics.

In particular, Deirdre McCloskey argues that “Hayekian-Kirznerian” economics contributes to an explanation of “the Great Fact of an increase of real income per head by a factor of anything from 16 to (if quality is allowed for) 100” (p. 38). Setting aside the fact that it is immaterial to the issue of Hayek’s relevance for behavioral economics, McCloskey’s essay is peculiar in that she argues, contrary to her well-known view concerning the centrality of rhetorical persuasion to theory choice in economics, that it was the comparative explanatory power of the Austrian system that convinced her to adopt it. ^{Footnote 3}

In another essay unrelated to the book’s purported subject matter, Walter Block insists that a commitment to apriorist praxeology is an essential characteristic of an Austrian economist, and that Hayek’s lackluster engagement with praxeology makes him a “semi but not a full Austrian” (p. 79). Two responses are appropriate here: a) “Who cares?” ^{Footnote 4} and b) Block’s criteria is vulnerable to a simple reductio: praxeology, with its purportedly synthetic a priori “action axiom” was an invention (if you prefer, discovery) of Ludwig von Mises, a third-generation Austrian. So, if a commitment to apriorist praxeology is required to count as fully Austrian, then Carl Menger—the school’s undisputed founder—fails to qualify. ^{Footnote 5}

Two of the collection’s longer essays misconstrue Hayek’s perspective utterly. Without any consideration of the extensive literature on the topic, Morris Altman revives the worn-out old chestnut that Hayek committed the naturalistic fallacy. ^{Footnote 6} Altman makes a Pangloss out of Hayek on the basis of an anorexic examination of six writings from the latter’s massive oeuvre while ignoring the works (Hayek Reference Hayek1960, p. 67; 1988, pp. 20 and 27) in which Hayek explicitly denies the charge of the naturalistic fallacy.

The essay by co-editor Roger Frantz is rampant with factual misstatements and simple interpretative errors. To name a few: Hayek (1952, p. 4) was clear in The Sensory Order that, contrary to Frantz (pp. 10–11), “the physical order” is not to be identified with “reality.” Moreover, Hayek never “called subjective knowledge tacit knowledge” (p. 19), nor would he: tacit knowledge is not accessible to introspection (Hayek 1952, p. 19); but, of course, many items of subjective knowledge are introspectable. Similarly, some “knowledge of circumstances of time and place” may be tacit knowledge, but—again, contrary to Frantz (pp. 2, 22–23)—the former is not identical with the latter. Furthermore, Hayek, like his friend Karl Popper, accepted that prediction and explanation are two sides of the same coin (Hayek Reference Hayek1967, p. 9n4), and so, contrary to Frantz (p. 19), would have rejected Harvey Leibenstein’s hard-and-fast distinction between prediction and explanation; nor did Hayek identify trend predictions with what he called “explanations of the principle,” as Frantz mistakenly asserts (p. 20).