My colleague Emily Chamlee-Wright recently was awarded the Hayek prize from The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders. From the press release:

The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation announces that Professor Emily Chamlee-Wright, the Elbert H. Neese Professor of Economics at Beloit College and an Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University is the recipient of its fourteenth Hayek Prize. These $10,000 prizes are awarded on an occasional basis to scholars whose work, informed by the Austrian perspective of methodological individualism, has pursued in significant ways areas outside the normal fields of academic economics. In Chamlee-Wright’s case the Fund cites in particular her work at the intersection of studies of entrepreneurship, philanthropy, the civil society, and market activities through her work on female entrepreneurs in local markets in Zimbabwe and Ghana and on voluntary disaster relief and reconstruction efforts after the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This latter project she is currently pursuing as principal investigator at the Katrina project of The Mercatus Center.

In this last article she writes, “Though most post-Katrina redevelopment plans assume that a large scale government response is the only way to overcome the collective action problem, qualitative analysis presented here suggests that the resources found within and signals emanating from commercial and civil society represent an alternative paradigm for how communities can rebound in the wake of disaster.” From her work we can see that a similar argument can be made about economic development in non western cultures and in the effectiveness of private philanthropy.