My article “Information,
organization, and freedom: Explaining the great reversal”, co-authored by
colleague and friend Xavier de Vanssay (Glendon College, York university, Canada) has
been published in the new issue of The Review
of Austrian Economics (Volume 25, Issue 4(2012), Page 329-350) here.
.
We suggest, in a Coase-Demsetz perspective, that the social demand for
individual rights – or freedoms (whether civil, political or economic) – is derived
from, because complementary to, the changing size of hierarchical
organizations. The general downsizing and decentralization process observed
worldwide after 1975 is itself the result of the information revolution and the
resulting abundance of information. It follows that social demand for freedoms
depends in turn – and inversely – on the cost of information (and thus market
imperfection) as well as on traditional determinants such as the distribution
of resources and human capital. This implies that freedoms are adopted,
implemented, or “produced” by various political regimes according to an
objectively observable and contingent determinant. We believe this approach can
shed light on the reason for the waxing and waning of freedoms in modern
history.
