Private planning

Pete Boettke points us to the Mercatus 40th anniversary celebration of Hayek's Nobel award. Keynote Israel Kirzner discusses the context and the various advances in Austrian economics in these forty years. Watch the video. 

But whereas the idea of centrally planned economies has fallen on hard times these past forty years, the idea of top-down planning of cities and regions remains respectable almost everywhere. In the modern version, the threat of environmental crisis is invoked and conventional city planning is seen as an important antidote. Yet quite a bit of private planning goes on in cities -- and much more could be done. These are the themes of a new anthology, Cities and Private Planning, edited by David Emanuel Andersson and Stefano Moroni that was just published. Included is a chapter by Wendell Cox and myself.

There is a growing library of discussions of private city planning. Look here, here, here, here for starters. There will be more. Most of the authors included in these volumes are on the job.