Subjectivism and Economic Analysis: Essays in memory of Ludwig ...

ROGER KOPPLand infrequent. The rules that count here are both formal andinformal. Indeed, the only formal rules that count are those that areenforced at least some of the time. Human habits are constantlychanging piecemeal. Thus, perfect stability is impossible. But we canoften say that the rules of the game are more stable in this market,less stable in that one.Competition is atomistic when it is rivalrous. When each supplierconsiders his own actions to have an insignificant impact on theoverall market, when there is little ‘rival consciousness’ (Machlup1952), then competition is ‘atomistic’ in the relevant sense.Under these conditions of stability and atomism, Butos and Ihave argued, evolutionary selection mechanisms of the sort Hayekanalysed will produce relatively prescient economic expectationsand relatively high levels of economic efficiency. Stable evolutionaryenvironments produce prescient expectations in the social world,goodness of fit in the biological world.The evolutionary and Hayekian considerations of the presentsection may not seem to fit well with the phenomenological andSchutzian considerations of the previous section. Butos and Iadopted the Hayekian view of expectations as (mostly) dispositionsto act. The Schutzian framework takes expectations to bepsychological states. It is not immediately obvious that these areconsistent perspectives. Some definitions may help to clarify theissues.Let the term ‘dispositional expectations’ refer to the Hayekianview and the term ‘psychological expectations’ refer to thephenomenological or hermeneutical view of expectations.Psychological expectations refer to people’s thoughts. Dispositionalexpectations refer to people’s actions.The ‘expectations’ of economic theory are often dispositionalexpectations. We say that creditors ‘expect’ zero inflation if they donot insist on an inflation premium. This ‘expectation’ may benothing more than the conformity to old habits and ways of doingbusiness. Conceivably, some creditors might even have apsychological expectation of inflation. If they don’t understand theeffect of inflation on purchasing power, they won’t ask for aninflation premium. The case imagined is not purely hypothetical.Recently, an important Italian labour leader expressed concern overthe government’s low inflation target. Such low inflation, heclaimed, would reduce the purchasing power of workers’ wages.Methodological subjectivists insist that one must be able to give areasonable account of the psychological expectations animating the74