Parochialism, by which we mean in-group preferences and out-group prejudice, has the potential to influence public policy. In-group preferences and out-group prejudice can lead individuals to evaluate a policy based on how that policy affects the groups they belong to rather than on the basis of their ideological priors or the impact of that policy on society at large. Unchecked, parochialism likely leads to problematic policies and perverse social outcomes. While the evidence suggests that this bias can be mitigated if issues are framed in ways that encourage reflection as opposed to unreflective immediate responses, policy makers face incentives to leverage parochialism rather than combat it. The solution may instead require limiting policy makers and our ability to make decisions for others and promoting an institutional environment that encourages our interacting with diverse others rather than insularity. Stated another way, limited government and open society may be the path beyond our parochialism.

Friedrich A. Hayek argues that “equality of the general rules of law and conduct” is the only kind of equality compatible with liberty and, moreover, that attempting to pursue equality along any other dimension is likely to destroy liberty. For Hayek, then, as a social philosopher and political economist who was principally concerned with understanding and promoting liberal order, the question “What kind of equality?” has a straightforward answer. Equality before the law, perhaps equality of opportunity in a procedural sense, is the equality that we should pursue, not material equality and certainly not equality of outcomes. One wonders, though, whether Hayek dismisses too quickly the more substantive forms of equality and, more importantly, whether we can achieve the liberal society that Hayek envisions without concerning ourselves with more than just the presence or absence of equality of the general rules of law and conduct. This essay will explore, criticize, and expand upon the way that Hayek makes use of equality in his conception of a free society. Specifically, we argue that Hayek may need a more substantive conception of equality than he is willing to deploy in order to arrive at the liberal society he hopes to bring about.

Trust is an important component of all successful commercial exchanges. Indeed, there is now a considerable literature on the economic importance of trust as well as the relationship between trust and institutions. Although there is now a sizeable literature on the economic importance of trust, and on the institutions that are associated with higher levels of trust, this literature remains relatively silent on the potential of markets to generate trust and, more specifically, how market actors discover whom to trust and, perhaps more importantly, whom not to trust. In this paper, we build on research by market process theorists that understands the market as a discovery process. We argue that the market is also a discovery process through which market participants acquire knowledge about their trading partners' dispositions, moral priorities, and personalities. Specifically, we argue that the market facilitates the identification of trustworthy and untrustworthy individuals and is, thus, a process for the discovery of whom to trust and whom not to trust. Additionally, we report experimental evidence that suggests that although market participants are trusting of strangers (at least in our experimental setting), they are less trusting of trading partners who have proven to be untrustworthy in past dealings.

In multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), member-distributors earn income from selling products and recruiting new members. Successful MLMs require a social capital structure where members can access and mobilize both strong and weak social ties. Utah has a disproportionate share of MLM companies located in the state and a disproportionate number of MLM participants. We argue that Utah's dominant religious institutions have led to the emergence of a social capital structure, making MLMs particularly viable. Utah is the most religiously homogeneous state; roughly half its population identifies as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The LDS Church's institutions foster a social capital structure where (almost all) members have access to and can leverage social capital in all its forms. LDS institutions encourage members to make meaningful social connections characterized by trust and reciprocity with other church members in local neighborhoods and across the world.

Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States on 29 October 2012, flooding hundreds of thousands of homes and costing over $50 billion in property damage. After Hurricane Sandy residents and communities required food, water and clothing, and in the weeks and months following, there was demand for cleaning supplies, building materials and contracting services. Polycentric orders, because of their flexibility and access to local knowledge, are well suited to respond to the challenges of disaster. We highlight the importance of privately provided social services within polycentric orders and illustrate that the private provision of these services was important to post-disaster recovery in the Orthodox Jewish community in the Rockaway Peninsula in New York.

Ha-Joon Chang (2011), in his article ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’, argues that economists place too much faith in ‘liberalized’ institutions. Institutions matter for growth, he contends, but not the way institutional economists think they do. In this article, we offer a defense of the hypothesis that ‘institutions matter’ for economic growth and present several objections to Chang's arguments.