Concluding remarks

Here a paradox seems to emerge: following Vaughn’s reconstruction of Austrian thought, it might be argued (as in Bowles and Gintis 1993) that new developments of what Vaughn considers neoclassical theory have done more than the Austrians for providing an individualistically based explanation of those elements-such as habits and customary business procedures-which characterise economic institutions. But this is of course untrue, as Vaughn herself stresses in her reassessment of Hayek s theory of knowledge and the related efforts by O’Driscoll and Rizzo to develop an economics of time and ignorance in which ‘the existence of private and tacit knowledge implies that nonprice signals can contain important market information’ (136).