Per Bylund is an economist and professor at Oklahoma State University, known for his work in Austrian economics, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order. He’s the author of “How to Think About the Economy” and a passionate advocate for bottom-up systems and voluntary cooperation, follow Per on Twitter
We talk about how markets self-organize, why central planning fails, the moral case for capitalism, and how freedom relates to meaning. Topics are outlined in the timestamps below.
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Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
02:34 – What mainstream economists miss about markets
05:08 – Entrepreneurship as the engine of discovery
07:42 – How value is created in a decentralized system
10:16 – Knowledge, action, and economic calculation
12:50 – The morality of capitalism and voluntary exchange
15:24 – What economic freedom actually means
17:58 – Bureaucracy, coercion, and institutional blindness
20:32 – Why central planning is inherently broken
23:06 – Real-world failures of economic interventions
25:40 – How Austrian economics explains spontaneous order
28:14 – Emergence vs design in social systems
30:48 – The role of uncertainty in entrepreneurial action
33:22 – Profit, loss, and correcting systemic errors
35:56 – Scarcity, choice, and subjective value
38:30 – Why technocratic fixes always fall short
41:04 – Ethics and the epistemology of free societies
43:38 – What school gets wrong about economics
46:12 – Final thoughts on flourishing and decentralization
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