Don Lavoie

Donald Charles Lavoie (1951–2001) was an American economist who completed a computer science degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1973 before earning his economics doctorate under Israel Kirzner at New York University in 1981. He joined George Mason University the same year, where his dissertation grew into Rivalry and Central Planning (1985) and National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (1985), both rehabilitating Ludwig von Mises’s socialist calculation argument against the then-dominant view that it had been settled. With Richard Ebeling he later led an interpretive, or “hermeneutic,” turn in Austrian economics, drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer, and supervised an influential generation of students including Peter Boettke and Steven Horwitz before his death from a stroke at 50, following a cancer diagnosis.