Friedrich Hayek

“The key importance of the amount of information available and the frequent lack of relevant information have been dealt with only in the last decades. L. von Mises and F. A. von Hayek can rightly be regarded as pioneers in this connection.”

“All the general propositions favouring freedom I had … imbibed at my father's knee or acquired by candle-end reading of Burke and Hayek .."”

“For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.”

“Adam Smith, the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman.”

“During the following decade [of the 1950s] modern economic history took a dramatic swing away from the liberal-left consensus established by the Hammonds, Tawney and the Webbs. The seminal text for this change of direction was the 1954 collection of essays compiled by F. A. Hayek, "Capitalism and the Historians".”

“Popper's falsification is intimately connected to the notion of an {{w|open society}}. ...one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl Popper shared ideas with his friend, the low-key economist von Hayek, who endorsed capitalism as a state in which prices can disseminate information that bureaucratic socialism would choke.”

“What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy.”

“Mrs. Hayek, I want you each day in the future to address your husband and inquire what his progress has been in what I consider to be one of the most interesting and intriguing fields, the evolution of the work of scholars.”

“I first had to discover certain things for myself, and essentially it was the behavior I observed in human subjects in my laboratory study of markets that motivated me eventually to study Hayek seriously. Reading with the eyes of a new mind, I was able to appreciate an enormous depth of understanding in the work of Hayek that would have escaped me if I had not had this personal experience in the laboratory.”

“Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century.”

“Which of Hayek's ideas are now widely accepted? I can't think of any. … Hayek's big idea - basically, that efficient market outcomes are emergent - is absent from most econ (though supported by lab experiments).”

“[Hayek] became [in his later years] the dominant intellectual influence of the last quarter of the twentieth century.”

“Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes — his chief intellectual rival of the century — in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments."”

“No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.”

“Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at). He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake. Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run.”

“I am not persuaded that Hayek got the substantive connections entirely right. He was too captivated by the enabling effects of the market system on human freedoms and tended to downplay - though he never fully ignored - the lack of freedom for some that may result from a complete reliance on the market system, with its exclusions and imperfections, and the social effects of big disparities in the ownership of assets. But it would be hard to deny Hayek's immense contribution to our understanding of the importance of judging institutions by the criterion of freedom.”

“The Hayek I met on various occasions – at the LSE, at the University of Chicago, in Stockholm (1945), at Lake Constance-Lindau Nobel summer conferences – definitely bemoaned progressive income taxation, state-provided medical care and retirement pensions, fiat currencies remote from gold and subject to discretionary policy decisions by central bank and treasury agents.”

“Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.”

“While often right and enormously influential, Hayek himself agreed that some of his predictions did not become true.”

“Lange argued that what economists now call neoclassical price theory showed the possibility of combining central planning and the market, and Hayek retorted that planning would subvert at its heart the mechanism that gave capitalism its vitality. Hayek’s criticisms of market socialism, and more recently those of Janos Kornai, are for the most part on the mark. But the experiences of capitalism, as well as of socialism, in the last fifty years suggest ways of reformulating the concept of market socialism in response to the Hayekian critique of its intellectual ancestor.”