[From The Essential von Mises]

In an infamous scene from season 3 of zombie apocalypse show The Walking Dead, the protagonists, who have left their fortified base for the sake of supplies, are pictured driving down a road bordered densely by trees. A lone hitchhiker soon appears on the desolate stretch. Upon seeing their approaching car, he gesticulates wildly and yells, “Slow down! I’m begging you.” But unblinkingly they cruise past, and the hitchhiker falls in despair to his knees. On their way back only hours later, a red smudge on the asphalt is all that remains.

At this week’s Strategic Management Conference in Madrid I participated in an interesting session on Media Innovations, along with Will Mitchell and Wiley’s Caroline McCarley. My remarks focused on academics and their use of social media. How (if at all) can professors use blogs, videos, wikis, and other social media products to disseminate their research, to improve their teaching, and even to discover new ideas?

Damon Linker, the writer who believes that the State is the Measure of All Things Great, has declared that the concept of what F.A. Hayek called the “spontaneous order,” is a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.” This is how Linker describes the concept: