Why the Sporder Approach? Or, Is Economics Enough?

This could have easily become another blog about economics or politics or philosophy or current events, as all of us are eagerly interested and fairly qualified to comment on these subjects.  But we chose to center our blog around the idea of sporders.

I want to take a moment to describe why I think several economically-savvy bloggers, most of us aspiring to become professional economists, are taking a broader leap outside of normal “economics” to explore sporders.  Of course, this is just my own opinion and ex-post facto rationalization.  But nonetheless, I think this approach brings something new and useful to the table of understanding our world and seeking to improve it.  The sporder framework seems to be effective, honest, and interesting.   Continue reading

The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

I have particularly obsessed with epistemology in the last few weeks – that is, the nature of knowledge.  I’ve always found the subject interesting, but since my intellectual transformation to (and through) the Austrian school of Economics, methodology of the social sciences has always puzzled me.  Apriorism and extreme rationalism no longer sits well with me like it once did, so I am exploring its ontological possibility and its practical limits.  But that’s for another series of posts and probably a paper.

At the beginning of the summer, I wrote a blog post called “A Critical Rationalist Epiphany at a Bookstore” (on my old blog, now long gone), exploring the nature of critical rationalism and the sporder of knowledge.  I wrote this before we launched Sporder and I started re-framing most of my thoughts in terms of sporders.  I wanted to repost it here for two reasons (aside from the fact that I find the subject fascinating): 1) It deals with the sporder of knowledge and 2) I want to use it as a reference to dive more deeply into epistemology in some forthcoming posts.

And I am currently reading Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery so I am slowly gaining credibility to grapple with his ideas.

Below is the original post, unaltered:  Continue reading

Sporder is a Word

We’re making it happen.  ”Sporder,” is short for “spontaneous order” and is used to describe any scenario where such an order can be found.  It’s catchy, economical, and intuitive and it requires but 2 syllables as opposed to 7.  We have come up with a precise definition for a sporder, as well as categories the various types of sporder found within our universe. Continue reading