Economics
Friedrich Hayek
Economist, Nobel Prize in Economics 1974
Born 1899 · Died 1992
Photo: The original uploader was DickClarkMises at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0
«The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.»
Friedrich Hayek argued that prices carry information no central planner could ever assemble, which is why planned economies fail. His book The Road to Serfdom made him famous far beyond economics and shaped political debate for decades.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Economics, 1974, for monetary and business cycle theory
- Wrote The Road to Serfdom, 1944
- Tooke Professor at LSE, where he debated Keynes for two decades
Universities
London, Holborn
Professor from 1931 to 1950, where he conducted his long public argument with John Maynard Keynes.
Facts
- His debate with Keynes in the 1930s is the most famous argument in the history of economics, and both men remained on friendly terms.
- The Road to Serfdom was condensed in Reader's Digest and sold in enormous numbers to people who had never read an economics book.
- He shared his Nobel Prize with Gunnar Myrdal, an economist whose politics were almost the opposite of his own.
Photographs
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