Erwin Dekker
Historian of economics, culture and econ, author of 'Realizing the Values of Art' the biography of 'Jan Tinbergen and the Rise of Economic Expertise' and 'Viennese Students of Civilization'.
- Very proud of this (open-access) paper with Valeria Morea in which we develop a theory of co-production, grounded in economic theory, particularly household production. We sift through the many definitions, and specify precisely when co-production is likely to work! doi.org/10.1007/s108...
- Our illustrations all come from the (performing) arts, we inquire for instance why crowd co-production might or might not work, and how credible commitments like 'the encore' can contribute to audience co-production.
- This week's post at Seeing Like Chicago explores academic freedom ca. 1915 through William Thomas defense of his lecture on women's rights seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/william-i-...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerNeon Liberalism #60: Samantha and guest Will Stancil talk the murder of Renée Good and the Trump administration's larger assault on Minneapolis. Will is working with his neighborhood rapid reaction group in Minneapolis, and he recounts witnessing ICE abductions and confronting ICE agents.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerWe’re back today, with JS Mill (and as we’ll hear Harriet Taylor Mill) on the case for personal liberty and the limits of state interference. The presenter is Misha Glenny www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerOur December issue is out, with five article, four book reviews, and two letters to the editor. This is the last issue edited by Pedro Duarte and Jiména Hurtado. As incoming editors, we would like to take the opportunity to express a great thanks for the excellent job they have done!
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker➡️ Œconomia 15(3) — Accounting for Quality in Economics Edited by C. Bessy, @erwindekker.bsky.social & @juliengradoz.bsky.social 🔗 journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/19... Comes also with a dozen of book reviews on hedge funds, econ expertise in Soviet Union, Solow's model, or digital capitalism.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerToday, I spoke with Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer. In April, when I met with him in El Salvador, Trump said he would never set foot in the U.S. again. This case has never been about one man alone; if the govt can violate the constitutional rights of one, all our rights are threatened.
- This week's post returns to Friedman's Methodology of Positive Economics, to uncover some Knightian themes seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/lets-argue...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerNew open-access article at JHET by Miriam Bankovsky, Rebeca Gomez Betancourt, and Marianne Johnson, which discusses family economics and poverty around the turn of the 20th century: doi.org/10.1017/S105...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerNew book review out at JHET, Minghui Hu reviews Amelung and Schefold's edited volume comparing European and Chinese Histories of Economic Thought: doi.org/10.1017/S105...
- This week's post continues the comparison between Knight and Hayek, and traces the origins of the 'de gustibus non est disputandum' phrase within the Chicago school. And it tells you something about how to become a better version of yourself: seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/lets-argue...
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker"By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies" Read this excellent @wsj.com account of the business deals behind the "peace"negotiations www.wsj.com/world/russia...
- Hayek famously proposed that the economist should act more like a gardener than the artisan or craftsman. In this week's post I discuss Frank Knight's critique of the gardener metaphor (formulated quite a few decades before Hayek made his arguments).
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerThis is a really big story that should not be missed. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerNew article at JHET: doi.org/10.1017/S105... On Heinrich Dietzel's attempt to reconcile the different camps in the German Methodenstreit of the late 19th century.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerDipshit is smashing out a car window with his gun, barrel first. Just rogue, cowboy stiff. There were two US citizens in the car. They were apprehended and detained for “obstructing” ICE by honking their horn to let people know ICE was in the neighborhood.
- This week's post at Seeing Like Chicago is about Saul Alinsky, the famous community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals. To my surprise, he studied crime, hanging out with Al Capone's gang, while studying sociology around 1930. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/saul-alins...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerAntoine Missemer and two guest editors Béatrice Cointe and Christophe Cassen are launching a call for papers for a special issue of Œconomia on the history of climate economics. journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/19...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerNew JHET article out, open access.
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker"If courts endorse the broad definition of 'invasion' advocated by the admin, dire consequences will follow.... the federal government could suspend the writ of habeas corpus and detain people (including U.S. citizens) at will." -- @ilyasomin.bsky.social on Cato's amicus brief in AEA case @cato.org
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker1) 'Why I Resigned' from UVa Prez 100% worth reading www.documentcloud.org/documents/26... 2) Events were forced by NYT story w leaked info that he was under pressure to resign. UVa prez has 'no idea' where leaks came from (See below.) 3) FWIW same NYT team did leaked "Harvard will cave" stories
- This week's post 'Hotel Life' is actually coming from Chicago, where I am doing archival work. It reflects, from my own long-stay hotel-room, on the 1920s fear that the rich and upper middle-class would give up their homes to live in hotels. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/hotel-life
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerI just received a document from DHS showing that it has a detained population of 65,000, a staggering total, nearing half the total prison population detained by the Bureau of Prisons. The project is to jam them in horrible conditions until they give up their rights to stay
- Reposted by Erwin Dekkerhey i wrote an article about folk names for birds and you should check it out!!! open.substack.com/pub/weirdmed...
- The perfect symbol of a rigged economy
- This week's Seeing like Chicago post revisits Hofstadter's Age of Reform, and its analysis of agrarian populism ca. 1890 and the coalition it formed with the Progressives in the next decade. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/the-age-of...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerWondering why no one likes your posts anymore, even among your friends? It's because @jay.bsky.team and team have decided to hide a huge amount of content from all of our feeds by default. Here's how to turn it off. First go to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner
- New paper alert Toward an Austrian Theory of the Self in The Review of Austrian Economics. It's Open Access! In the paper I explore connect the Austrian theory of subjectivism to the philosophical sociology of George Herbert Mead and argue that we to explain, not assume, individual heterogeneity
- "The alternative is to start with Hayek’s idea that the theory of the individual should be a theory of the individual in society. This theory should explain how society generates individual heterogeneity and enables individual subjectivity."
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerOn the left, the refurbished Lincoln bathroom. On the right, picture I took in Saddam Hussein's palace in Basra in 2005.
- This week's Seeing like Chicago post talks about the importance of 'seeing through the eyes of others' and how it became a moral-political project among sociologists. With several shout-outs to the great new book Liberal Emancipation by Mikayla Novak. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/seeing-thr...
- Among the suspected effects are a higher frequency of tropical storms, which scientists earlier linked to climate change.
- RFK Jr. directs CDC to study alleged harms of offshore wind farms, Bloomberg News reports reut.rs/4hxHgEh
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerSo they didn’t like the ad. Let’s just post Reagan’s 5 min speech against tariffs as it appears on YouTube. Over and over. On all platforms (some of y’all are still on X). *1981 Sherrilyn horrified by 2025 Sherrilyn saying “let’s post Reagan’s speech.” youtu.be/5t5QK03KXPc
- New Seeing Like Chicago post discusses real and imagined differences between the city and countryside. With a discussion of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Albert Blumenthal's Small Town Stuff seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/the-rural-...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerThe 7 million Americans who took the streets for 'No Kings' made history, and they did something even more important They got under the skin of Donald Trump and his dictatorial regime, on a day that showed that most Americans love democracy instead My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/no-k...
- This week's Seeing Like Chicago's post discusses some very surprising links between the Studs Lonigan trilogy (a coming of age story about the Irish-American Studs) and hip-hop culture, including a 1920's Dapper Dan O'Doul. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/chicagos-s...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerHyped to read the special issue that goes with this introduction by @vhalsmayer.bsky.social and Eric Hounshell. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- This week's Substack post discusses the links between Richard Wright's classic Chicago novel, Native Son, and Harold Garfinkel's early (ethnomethodological) studies of the way juries work in Chicago. Or simply, how institutional racism was understood in the 1940s.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerThe following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker
Rousseau, Adaptive Preferences, and Social Entrepeneurship open.substack.com/pub/digressi... Shout outs to @erwindekker.bsky.social, @lastpositivist.bsky.social, @serenekhader.bsky.social - Reposted by Erwin DekkerI feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerThen, in 32(5), Lenfant reviews Bridel (following on their interview also in the same issue), Greitens reviews a new translation of Schurtz, @madelinew.bsky.social reviews @arnaudorain.bsky.social, @erwindekker.bsky.social reviews Slobodian www.tandfonline.com/toc/rejh20/3...
- Reposted by Erwin Dekker“People over Papers, a crowdsourcing project that maps sightings of US immigration agents, was taken offline yesterday by Padlet, the collaborative bulletin board platform on which it was built. It’s just the latest ICE-tracking initiative to be pulled by tech platforms in the past few days.”
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerBREAKING: A federal judge has granted a restraining order blocking President Trump's call-up of the National Guard in Portland. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerICE says I cause assaults on ICE by reciting facts about ICE’s recent shooting but refuses to link to the thread. Only posting a picture. ICE lies and ICE hides. You can read the facts for yourselves
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerMy colleague Mikayla Novak has a new edited volume out called "Liberal Emancipation." She has brought together a great group of scholars, including @erwindekker.bsky.social, @ottolehto.bsky.social, and even me, to analyze the emancipatory aspects of liberalism! Read on to learn what I argue... 🧵
- This week's post tells the story of Joseph D. Lohman who could not defend his dissertation because of death threats from the gang he had studied. Chicago sociologists did much to 'normalize' crime, but this for them too must have been unusual. seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/on-not-fin...
- And here is the first post, on Ben Hecht and his humanism. In my eyes Hecht was the best and most characteristic observer of Chicago in the interwar period seeinglikechicago.substack.com/p/ben-hechts...
- I will be writing about my research on Chicago once a week at this new Substack: Seeing like Chicago Do subscribe, for a weekly note! seeinglikechicago.substack.com
- Great new paper on enactivism and expectations in economics: "Rather than understanding expectations as internal representations, it argues that engagement with institutional temporal affordances gives rise to distinct modes of expectation – institutionally enacted ways of relating to the future."
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerA new issue of Œconomia. History | Methodology | Philosophy is available now journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/18...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerI do not regret to inform you that we are going to win www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/e...
- New PhD-student run journal in the history of economics, Oikonomos, has just published its first issue oikonomosjournal.com/index.php/oi...
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerI’m in Vienna right now. A city which went from being the intellectual and cultural capital of the world to a “provincial backwater” (to quote Brian Barry) in a couple of decades due to nationalism, anti-semitism and fascism which drove away the leading scholars and artists it didn’t murder.
- I remember when economists spoke of premature deindustrialization in Asia and Africa. Now the Trump administration appears set on turning back the clock, and reindustrialize the USA. It might well mean that the supposedly 'premature' can pick up the baton of the knowledge and tech economy.
- Reposted by Erwin DekkerThis hits so close to home. We are only off the H1B for a year and a half. On the one hand very thankful my employee was so supportive with the green card procedure, on the other hand very angry at the closing of opportunities for so many.
