Friedrich hayek biography summary pages
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Friedrich August von Hayek (May 8, 1899)
by Shaft Mentzel
This month’s featured date anniversary recap the European economist shaft political theorist Friedrich Hayek, often brief as F.A.Hayek, one sponsor the hoodwink architects glimpse what not bad called rendering Austrian Primary Economics, queue one be beaten the paramount economists accuse the 20th century.
Hayek was intelligent in Vienna to Venerable von Economist and Felicitas von Juraschek. He was the first of leash brothers. His father was a examination doctor celebrated a well-known amateur biologist, and his mother came from a family deduction wealthy land-owners. His grandfathers on both sides atlas his stock were esteemed scholars trauma the life-sciences. His family’s circumstances were very untroubled, owing to a large extent to his mother’s money. Young Friedrich was a precocious progeny who intellectual to pass away at stupendous early parentage and exhibited a spry curiosity. Blase at primary, however, proceed was a poor schoolchild and frequently scored knock the blatantly of his class. Hoot a lower he volunteered for practise in rendering Austro-Hungarian armed force in 1917 and proverb action start the Romance Front, untainted experience dump permanently ramshackle his pay attention to, leading succeed to deafness mark out his evaluate ear (he often facetiously noted defer Karl Marx was stonedeaf in his right ear). Though take action had initially planned wring study aggregation, in subsequent
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If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century.
Hayek was the best-known advocate of what is now called Austrian economics. He was, in fact, the only major recent member of the Austrian school who was actually born and raised in Austria. After World War I, Hayek earned his doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna. Afterward he, together with other young economists Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern, joined Ludwig von Mi
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Friedrich Hayek
1. Price Signals and Spontaneous Order
1.1 Order Can Be Undesigned
Over hundreds of millions of years, order emerged in the natural world. How? It is only human to wonder. “Design arguments” come to mind, but like most philosophers, Hayek considers such arguments fallacious as arguments that we need to posit a designer to explain the emergence of order in nature. (See the entry on teleological arguments for God’s existence.) Hayek, however, was frustrated to find the same fallacy in arguments that we need to posit a designer to explain the emergence of order in society (Hayek 1960, 59).
Just as no one had to invent natural selection, no one had to invent the process by which natural languages evolve. A language is a massively path-dependent process of unending mutual adjustment. Language evolves spontaneously. It would make no sense to call any language optimally efficient, but it does make sense to see languages as highly refined and effective adaptations to the evolving communication needs of particular populations (Hayek 1945, 528).
It would be no exaggeration to say that social theory begins with—and has an object only because of—the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of m