The Cognitive Infrastructure of Economic Action: Monetary Stability, Deregulation, and the Reflexivity Trap of the Open Society in Milei’s Argentina

This article develops the concept of cognitive infrastructure to capture a dimension of institutional performance that the incentive-focused tradition in institutional economics has largely neglected. Cognitive infrastructure comprises three dimensions: a stable unit of account, traceable causal links, and correctable feedback loops. When inflation reaches extreme levels, it destroys these conditions, dissolving the capacity of economic agents to perceive causal connections between their actions and their outcomes. Applying this framework to Javier Milei’s Argentine reform program, the article draws on Hayek and Eucken to show how monetary stabilization, deregulation, and currency competition restore the cognitive conditions for economic calculation, and on Popper and Soros to identify a structural tension this reconstruction generates. The cognitive infrastructure the reforms seek to rebuild is depoliticized in its ideal form. Its reconstruction has nevertheless been pursued through highly personalized political methods that may themselves reintroduce the unpredictability the framework is designed to eliminate. This tension, the article argues, is a structural feature of post-collapse institutional reconstruction that the open society tradition has not adequately theorized.