Donald Charles Lavoie

Donald Charles Lavoie was born on 4 April 1951 and in 1973 completed a bachelor's degree in computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an unusual start for a future economist. At New York University he switched to economics and earned his doctorate in 1981 under Israel Kirzner, with a thesis that reopened the calculation debate of the 1930s. In the same year he went to George Mason University as Assistant Professor, where he remained until his death. From his dissertation came, in 1985, the two books that made him known: "Rivalry and Central Planning" with Cambridge University Press, a reconstruction in the history of science, and "National Economic Planning: What is Left?", a pointed engagement with the industrial-policy plans of the Reagan years. Both volumes rehabilitated Mises against the consensus of the time, according to which the calculation argument had been settled by the Lange-Lerner model. In the late 1980s, together with Richard Ebeling, Lavoie carried out the hermeneutic turn: drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer, he read the market as a discussion process based on understanding (Verstehen), not as a mere allocation mechanism. This brought him sharp criticism from the Rothbard-Hoppe camp at the Mises Institute, but made him the doctoral supervisor of an influential generation, among them Peter Boettke, Steven Horwitz and David Prychitko. At the Mercatus Center, the GMU research centre, he built up the "Social and Organizational Learning" programme and worked early on hypertext and groupware as cognitive tools. In the spring of 2001 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and on 6 November 2001 he died of a stroke at the age of fifty. In his honour the collected volume "Markets, Information and Communication" appeared posthumously, edited by Boettke and Chamlee-Wright.