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horsefacts 🚂
@horsefacts.eth
In my last year of econ undergrad, I was lucky enough to join Jerry Gaus's graduate seminars. At the time I was disillusioned with economics, which had turned out to be about building cartoon models and torturing data with statistics. Most academic econ was more fiction writing than truth seeking. In his seminars I found a different vision: an economics grounded in moral philosophy and political economy, influenced by evolutionary theory, anthropology, and complex systems. It was just one method in an approach to understanding our complex evolved social order that was much more honest and no less rigorous. I think he is the teacher who most influenced me, though I didn't know it at the time. I started learning to program because I wanted to explore agent-based evolutionary models. And I found myself working years later on cryptoeconomic coordination games. I never made it back to tell him this: he passed away four years ago today. I often wonder what he would think about Ethereum.
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horsefacts 🚂
@horsefacts.eth
As a teacher, he was known for being both extremely patient and generous with his students (even us undergrads) while holding them to a high standard of excellence. This was true in my brief experience. He was a great defender of Hayek and showed me that the really interesting parts of his work are not the economics. I'd need much longer casts to do justice to the ideas in "The Order of Public Reason" and "The Open Society and Its Complexities," but this is a good overview of his work: https://ppesociety.org/in-memoriam-jerry-gaus/
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Maretus
@maretus
Man it’s too bad to hear that he passed. I bet there aren’t many other professors instilling Hayek into people. That is awesome.
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