Posts filed under ‘Austrian Economics’
Group Blog of the NYU Austrian Economics Colloquium
| Peter Klein |
It’s ThinkMarkets, written by the members of the NYU Austrian colloquium (formerly currently known as the Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes). The group includes Mario Rizzo, Bill Butos, Gene Callahan, Young Back Choi, Sandy Ikeda, Roger Koppl, Chidem Kurdas, and Joe Salerno. The colloquium was established in the 1980s by Israel Kirzner, who is still an occasional participant.
A Silver Lining
| Peter Klein |
As I mentioned in a recent talk, one good thing to come out of the bailout disaster is the diminished reputation of St. Alan the Wise. It was fun watching the same Congressional clowns who months earlier praised the “Maestro” as the greatest Fed chair in history slap him down for failing to prevent the housing bubble. Of course, Greenspan, like these clowns, ignored the issue of credit expansion, expressing regret only that he had put “too much trust” in market forces. Ha!
Now Paulson, never too popular in the first place, is suffering a similar fate, as he abandons the Troubled Asset Relief Program — the rationale for the bailout itself — and praises Congress for giving him the broad authority to do, well, whatever the hell he wants. Oh, please, let Bernanke be next!
BTW, Bob Higgs continues to offer some of the best commentary on the disaster — the political, journalistic, and educational disaster, I mean, not the supposed economic disaster. I hope his term, “Bailout of Abominations,” catches on.
Update: The Economist puts it this way: “One of the most humbling features of the financial crisis is its ability to humiliate policymakers who, thinking that they have a bazooka in their closet, soon discover that it is a mere popgun.”
Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas
| Peter Klein |
The entrepreneur, writes Mises in one of my favorite passages, “is a speculator, a man eager to utilize his opinion about the future structure of the market for business operations promising profits.” The entrepreneur relies on his “specific anticipative understanding of the conditions of the uncertain future,” an understanding that “defies any rules and systematization.”
This passage was in my mind today as I read the WSJ front-pager about the computer models used by AIG to analyze asset risk. Poor Gary Gorton, who designed many of AIG’s models, is put on public display. AIG’s catastrophic failure is likely to fuel skepticism about the use of such models for risk analysis, though Gorton maintains the problem was the application of the models, not their basic design. (His Yale colleague Ian Ayres will likely agree.) Longtime skeptic Warren Buffet has the best line: “Beware of geeks . . . bearing formulas.”
Today’s paper also includes an item on Harry Markowitz, including this:
As with all new information tools at our disposal, applying portfolio theory to investing entails its share of trial and error. Mr. Markowitz admits some people might object to asking him how to repair the credit crisis. “You, Harry Markowitz, brought math into the investment process,” he imagines some people thinking. “It is fancy math that brought on this crisis. What makes you think now that you can solve it?”
He draws a line between his portfolio theory and its later misapplication. “Not all financial engineering is always bad,” he says, “but the layers of financially engineered products of recent years, combined with high levels of leverage, have proved to be too much of a good thing.”
Update (Nov. 5): See this related piece from the Times.
New Issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
| Peter Klein |
Volume 2, number 3 of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, a special issue edited by Sharon Alvarez and Jay Barney on “Opportunities, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship,” is now out. It features my paper “Opportunity Discovery, Entrepreneurial Action, and Economic Organization,” Nicolai’s paper with Kirsten Foss, “Understanding Opportunity Discovery and Sustainable Advantage: The Role of Transaction Costs and Property Rights,” and several others of interest. The abstracts from my paper and the Foss & Foss paper are below the fold. (more…)
Interviews with Alchian, Coase, Kirzner, Manne
| Peter Klein |
The Liberty Fund has put online several interviews from its Intellectual Portrait Series. Of particular interest to O&M readers:
- Armen Alchian, interviewed by Dan Benjamin
- Ronald Coase, interviewed by Richard Epstein
- Israel Kirzner, interviewed by Tibor Machan
- Henry Manne, interviewed by Fred McChesney
Update (Nov. 2): Manne link fixed.
Mises Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
Here is Mises on entrepreneurial “understanding,” a concept distinct from quantitative prediction according to a known model. You could even call it judgment. It’s particularly germane to current economic conditions and the phalanx of economic forecasters attempting to predict how the economy will do in the coming months and years. The source is a 1956 essay, “The Plight of Business Forecasting,” reprinted in Economic Freedom and Interventionism:
Economics can only tell us that a boom engendered by credit expansion will not last. It cannot tell us after what amount of credit expansion the slump will start or when this event will occur. All that economists and other people say about these quantitative and calendar problems partakes of neither economics nor any other science. What they say in the attempt to anticipate future events makes use of specific “understanding,” the same method which is practiced by everybody in all dealings with his fellow man. Specific “understanding” has the same logical character as that which characterizes all anticipations of future events in human affairs — anticipations concerning the course of Russia’s foreign policy, religious and racial conditions in India or Algeria, ladies’ fashions in 1960, the political divisions in the U.S. Senate in 1970; and even such anticipations as the future marital relations between Mr. X and his wife, or the success in life of a boy who has just celebrated his tenth birthday. There are people who assert that psychology may provide some help in such prognostications. However that may be, it is not our task to examine this problem. We have merely to establish the fact that forecasts about the course of economic affairs cannot be considered scientific.
Nair, Trendowski, and Judge on Penrose
| Peter Klein |
The October 2008 AMR features an essay by Anil Nair, Joseph Trendowski, and William Judge on Edith Penrose’s seminal Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959), written in the form of a book review. The essay is gated, but you can get a flavor from the conclusion:
Many economists call the unexplained variance in a regression equation the “Penrose effect.” According to Barney, it was left to strategy scholars to propose that the Penrose effect comprises the intangible resources and capabilities that are the source of sustained competitive advantage, and while these phenomena may be difficult to measure directly, the implications of these phenomena for firms’ operations and performance could be tested. After reviewing the passionate and prolific research that has attributed its intellectual roots to Penrose’s book, it is clear to us that her work was successful in rallying scholars who sought an alternative to the standard structure-conduct-performance model within strategy. However, scholars should be careful that Penrose’s theory (and the book) does not become a Rorschach blot on which they impose their own biases.
Here is a paper that links Penrose to Austrian concepts of subjectivism and capital heterogeneity. Penrose was of course a student of Fritz Machlup, himself a student of Mises. Apparently at one point the book was to be a joint project with Machlup; in Murray Rothbard’s papers is a memo Rothbard wrote for the Volker Fund evaluating a 1953 grant proposal by Machlup and Penrose for a “Growth of the Firm” project. (Rothbard’s assessment was unfavorable; he was, however, a fan of Penrose’s earlier paper on “Biological Analogies in the Theory of the Firm,” which he cites favorably in “The Mantle of Science.”)
Kirzner’s Tapestry
| Peter Klein |
One of the points I make in my forthcoming SEJ paper is that Kirzner’s metaphor of entrepreneurial discovery is, like Freud’s cigar, just a metaphor. It’s invoked by Kirzner to explain the tendency of markets to clear, not to describe a particular behavior or personality type. Applied entrepreneurship studies aimed at identifying what kinds of people really “are” more alert to opportunities, in some sense we can measure with a survey or experiment, misses the point of the metaphor. Likewise, Kirzner does not mean that opportunities literally are given, objectively, in the environment, independent of human creativity. “Discovery” is an analytical construct, an instrumental device, not a description of behavior.
Kirzner explains all this in a 1997 interview:
Q: What do you mean in saying something is “waiting” to be discovered?
A: Philosophically, people have objected to that. I do not mean to convey the idea that the future is a rolled-up tapestry, and we need only to be patient as the picture progressively unrolls itself before our eyes. In fact, the future may be a void. There may be nothing around the corner or in the tapestry. The future has to be created. Philosophically, all this may be so. But it doesn’t matter for the sake of the metaphor I have chosen.
Ex post we have to recognize that when an innovator has discovered something new, that something was metaphorically waiting to be discovered. But from an everyday point-of-view, when a new gadget is invented, we all say, gee, I can see we needed that. It was just waiting to be discovered.
Q: Consumer demand was there, resources were there, and the technology was there. . .
A: Yes, so there was no reason why it wasn’t being done. The entrepreneur is alert to this reality, to the profit opportunity it represents, and responds creatively to it.
Notice the emphasis on opportunities “metaphorically waiting to be discovered,” not literally waiting to be discovered. Kirzner isn’t offering a particular ontology or epistemology, just proposing an analytical device, designed for a specific purpose (to understand market clearing). Some of the literature comparing “discovery” and “creation” as alternative conceptions of the entrepreneurial act seems to me to read too much into Kirzner.
Krugman on the Hangover Theory
| Peter Klein |
More than one commentator has compared the economy in the current crisis to an alcoholic in the early stages of withdrawal. Going back on the bottle makes everything feel good again, but only puts off the inevitable. Ultimately, there can be no recovery without a painful rehab.
Keeping in mind Bob Higgs’s strictures about the misuse of metaphors, the illustration does serve a useful purpose. It helps demonstrate, as I’ve argued before, that the problem is not that overall lending is too low, but that the wrong loans were made by the wrong lenders to the wrong people (and, by extension, the wrong mortgage-backed securities boughy by the wrong investors, and so on). They key to recovery is not injecting “liquidity” into the system, but reallocating financial resources to the right borrowers and investors. In short, the worst thing we can be doing now is propping up the bad investments made during the boom, bailing out the unwise borrowers, lenders, and investors, putting off the liquidiation and reallocation that are ultimately necessary for recovery. All we have done over the last few weeks is give the alchoholic a few more drinks.
Paul Krugman’s Nobel citation, while focusing on his contributions to trade theory, mentions briefly his more recent work on financial crises. On this topic Krugman is more-or-less an unreconstructed, liquidity-trap Keynesian (Shawn Ritenour calls him a “paleo-Keynesian”). Krugman once wrote a popular piece about the Austrian approach to the business cycle, which he called the “hangover theory” of recessions. You can get a sense of how seriously Krugman takes the argument by his dismissive tone, writing for example about “those supposedly deep Austrian theorists” who failed to realize that total spending equals total consumption plus total investment. Clearly, he has read the Austrians as carefully as he has read Bertil Ohlin. Still, his essay gave Roger Garrison, John Cochran, and David Gordon the opportunity to respond with essays explaining the Austrian theory. (Krugman, characteristically, is unaware that the Austrian account of cycles is built on a particular theory of capital. If bad investments were made during the boom, he says, “Well, fine. Junk the bad investments and write off the bad loans. Why should this require that perfectly good productive capacity be left idle?” Um, Paul, it’s called asset specificity.)
Update: Here’s another response to Krugman (and Tyler Cowen) by Bob Murphy.
Salerno on Hayek
| Peter Klein |
Joe Salerno’s introduction to the Hayek collection mentioned earlier is now online. Writes Joe:
Hayek’s amazingly precocious intellect and creative genius are on full display in these works. Thus, before the age of thirty, Hayek already had fully mastered and begun to synthesize and build upon the major contributions of his predecessors in the Austrian tradition. These included, in particular: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and interest; Knut Wicksell’s further elaborations on Böhm-Bawerk’s capital theory and his own insights into the “cumulative process” of changes in money, interest rates and prices; Ludwig von Mises’s groundbreaking theories of money and business cycles; and the general analytical approach of the broad Austrian school from Menger onward that focused on both the subjective basis and the dynamic interdependence of all economic phenomena.
There is something else about Hayek that becomes apparent when reading his contributions in this volume. The young Hayek was a great economic controversialist, perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century. His entire macroeconomic system was forged within the crucible of the great theoretical controversies of the era. His opponents were some of the great (and not so great) figures in interwar economics: Keynes, W.T. Foster and W. Catchings, Ralph Hawtrey, Irving Fisher, Frank Knight, Joseph Schumpeter, Gustav Cassel, Alvin Hansen, A.C. Pigou, Arthur Spiethoff to name a few. Hayek took on all comers without fear or favor and inevitably emerged victorious. As Alan Ebenstein notes, “Hayek came to be seen in Cambridge, as Robbins and LSE’s point man in intellectual combat with Cambridge.”
Hayek’s views are essential to understanding the current mess, though it’s hard to summarize Hayek’s business-cycle theory in a bumper-sticker slogan that, say, Barney Frank could understand.
Monetary Policy and the Housing Crisis
| Dick Langlois |
I know I’m swimming over my head in macro-infested waters, but I thought I would think out loud some more about the housing mess. In my previous post on the subject (and comments), I posed the question whether a politically influenced (exogenous) lowering of credit standards was more of a culprit than monetary policy (or other macro forces) in causing the housing bubble and subsequent collapse. So I looked at an NBER Working Paper by John Taylor at Stanford that’s been out for a few months. Taylor argues that it was indeed Fed policy that caused the run-up in housing prices. He rejects the alternative possibilities (A) that most of the liquidity fueling the boom was money rushing in to the U.S. from overseas or (B) that it was the increased liquidity that came from securitization and financial innovation. Most interestingly, he argues — as have others, though I can’t find a good reference — that a large part of the reduction in lending standards was endogenous. Foreclosure risk was (is) anticorrelated with an increase in housing prices; so in the run-up, risk of foreclosure was actually declining ceteris paribus. Partly because of the complex and often impenetrable structure of housing finance, lenders took these foreclosure rates as stable in the long term. Moreover, as others have pointed out, lenders were concerned less with default in the run-up than with the risk of early repayment as people refinanced the equity out of their houses (or sold quickly for speculation, as Liebowitz says). All of this meant that lenders considered it optimal to lower credit standards.
This story strikes me as having a Hayekian flavor to it, though I don’t know if Peter and his commentators would agree. It also has something of Leijonhufvud about it, as Taylor’s main message is that the Great Moderation was a matter of the Fed sticking to the program — staying within the “corridor” — and not deviating as it did in 2003-2006, presumably in an effort to stimulate the economy after the Internet crash. The deviation of 2003-06 was “comparable to the turbulent 1970s.”
Mundane Austrian Economics
| Peter Klein |
The “Austrian” school of economics gets frequent mention on this blog. It even comes up in mainstream discussions of the financial crisis. But what exactly is it? Why do I care so much about the economy of Austria (or, I’m sometimes asked, Australia)?
The label “Austrian” describes a particular tradition in economic analysis, one that dates back to Viennese economist Carl Menger’s 1871 Principles of Economics (hence the geographic identifier). The Austrian approach is usually associated, particularly in applied fields like organization and strategy, with Hayek’s ideas about dispersed, tacit knowledge, Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurial discovery, and an emphasis on time, subjectivity, process, and disequilibrium. Even Lachmann’s “radical subjectivism” is getting some play. Various Fosses and Kleins have also argued that Austrian capital theory has some implications for entrepreneurship.
Despite this renewed interest in the Mengerian tradition, the Austrian approach to “basic” economic analysis — value, production, exchange, price, money, capital, and intervention — hasn’t gotten much attention at all. Indeed, it’s widely believed that the Austrian approach to mundane topics such as factor productivity, the substitution effect of a price change, the effects of rent control or the minimum wage, etc. is basically the same as the mainstream approach, just without math or with a few buzzwords about “subjectivism” or the “market process” thrown in. Even many contemporary Austrians hold this view.
In a new paper, “The Mundane Economics of the Austrian School,” I suggest instead that the Austrians offer a distinct and valuable approach to basic economic questions, an approach that should be central to research by Austrians on theoretical and applied topics in economics and business administration. (more…)
Revenge of the Aggregates
| Peter Klein |
I first studied macroeconomics back in the dark days before the microfoundations revolution had filtered down into the undergraduate curriculum. We learned Y = C + I + G and that was about it. Fluctuations in aggregate demand cause fluctuations in aggregate output, Hayek be damned. Relative price changes — between markets at the same place in the time-structure of production, or between higher- and lower-order sectors — were completely ignored.
Supposedly mainstream macroeconomics has moved beyond this crude level of aggregation. But you’d never know if from the discussions of the last few weeks. “Banks” aren’t “lending” enough. “Businesses” and “consumers” can’t get “loans.” “Firms” have too many “bad assets” on their books. The key question, though, is which ones? Which banks aren’t lending to which customers? Which firms have made poor investments? Newsflash: a loan isn’t a loan isn’t a loan. I hate to break it to the Chattering Class, but not every borrower should get a loan. The relevant question, in analyzing the current mess, is which loans aren’t being made, to whom, and why? The critical issues revolve around the composition of lending, not the aggregate amount. Focusing on total lending, total liquidity, average equity prices, and the like merely obscures the key questions about how resources are being allocated across sectors, firms, and individuals, whether bad investments are being liquidated, and so on. (more…)
What Would Hayek Say?
| Peter Klein |
About the events of the last week? Probably the same thing he said in 1932:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion. . . . To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection — a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. . . . It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.We must not forget that, for the last six or eight years, monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.
That’s from the introduction to Monetary Nationalism and International Stability, included in the new collection we mentioned earlier. Thanks to Jeff Tucker for the tip and links to the source material.
The Financial Crisis
| Peter Klein |
A regular reader asks why we haven’t written much on the US financial crisis. What, he asks, do organizational economics, strategic management, Austrian economics, entrepreneurship theory, and the new institutional economics say about the events of recent weeks?
I can’t speak for Nicolai, Dick, and Lasse, but I personally have avoided talking about it because, well, I’m too depressed — not so much about the crisis itself, which I view as a necessary corrective to two decades of potentially ruinous malinvestment, but about the political reaction to it. I agree with Larry White that the general level of discourse not just among laypeople but also among the political and financial elites, top journalists, and academics, has been shockingly vapid and vacuous, even by the usual standards. Listening to government officials, pundits, and analysts analyzing the crisis is like listening to my son’s first-grade class discussing the finer points of postmodern French literature. It was too much deregulation! (Huh?) The free market broke down yet again, just like in the 1930s! Market failure! Thank goodness the government is “stepping in”! Excuse me while I blow my groceries.
My view, in brief, is that the current crisis is the predictable result of a massive credit bubble that began under Greenspan in the 1990s and spilled over into the housing market, following the general outlines of the boom-bust cycle described by the Austrians, along with moral hazard encouraged by the financial “safety net” and the implicit (and, increasingly explicit) guarantees of the “too-big-to-fail” mentality. Of course, the US government’s reaction — spending taxpayer money like candy to bail out favored groups and institutions — can only exacerbate the problem. You can do your own Googling like this or this to find informed commentary. I have little to add but will highlight a few favorite comments: (more…)
Best Few Sentences I Read Today, Macroeconomics Edition
| Peter Klein |
Olivier Blanchard, writing on “The State of Macro[economics]”:
The editors of this new Journal asked me to write about “The Future of Macroeconomics.” Nobody should accept such a task. One can forecast the near future with some confidence: Research technology is largely Austrian in nature, with output following inputs later in time. One can see the various teams at work, and thus be confident that, sooner or later, they will succeed. But it is nearly impossible to forecast beyond that.
The paper is generating quite a lot of blogospheric buzz. Mark Thoma has posted a chunk for readers lacking NBER access. In case you’re wondering, no, the Austrian theory of the business cycle is not part of Blanchard’s anticipated future.
BTW I have not been able to figure out which journal this paper was written for. Does anybody know?
Reading List for My Entrepreneurship Course
| Peter Klein |
This semester I’m teaching a new PhD seminar, “Economics of Entrepreneurship: Theory, Applications, Debate.” Here’s an excerpt from the course description. The reading list is below the fold. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest-growing fields within economics, management, organization theory, finance, and even law. Surprisingly, however, while the entrepreneur is fundamentally an economic agent — the “driving force of the market,” in Mises’s (1949, p. 249) phrase — modern theories of economic organization and strategy maintain an ambivalent relationship with entrepreneurship. It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship is somehow important, but there is little consensus about how the entrepreneurial role should be modeled and incorporated into economics and strategy. Indeed, the most important works in the economic literature on entrepreneurship — Schumpeter’s account of innovation, Knight’s theory of profit, and Kirzner’s analysis of entrepreneurial discovery — are viewed as interesting, but idiosyncratic insights that do not easily generalize to other contexts and problems. . . .
This course presents a wide-ranging overview of the place of entrepreneurship in economic theory, with a special focus on applications to institutions, organizations, strategy, economic development, and related fields. It is intended for PhD students trained in economics, sociology, business administration, or a similar field (subject to instructor permission). Students are expected to be in at least their second year of their PhD program and to be working on a dissertation, or looking for a suitable dissertation topic. This is a research-oriented class in which students take an active role identifying suitable articles and topics for analysis, leading course discussions, and evaluating themselves and their peers. (more…)
Barry Smith Online
| Peter Klein |
I just learned that Barry Smith’s influential book, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Open Court, 1994), is available online in its entirety. This is not a book on the Vienna School or logical positivism or Wittgenstein, but on the general philosophical climate in Austria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the influence of this climate on Carl Menger’s economics. Menger, Smith has argued, was steeped in the Catholic, Aristotelian tradition of classical Austrian philosophy and this helps explain how his “causal-realist” approach differs from its Walrasian and Jevonsian counterparts.
Public Choice and Austrian Economics
| Peter Klein |
The Austrian school and the Public Choice or Virginia school of economics are often tightly linked, both among the lay public and within academic circles. The connection isn’t obvious, however. While members of both schools tend to have classical-liberal views on political economy, the Virginia school emerged from the Chicago public finance tradition (Buchanan, after all, was a student and disciple of Knight) and is thoroughly “neoclassical” in orientation. Public choice economists tend to look to Chicago, not Vienna, for inspiration.
Anamaria Berea, Art Carden, and Jeremy Horpedahl take a different tack, drawing out common threads in Buchanan’s and Hayek’s subjectivist approach to cost.
Cost and Choice and The Sensory Order represent tangents from the basic research programs of their respective authors, James M. Buchanan and F.A. Hayek. These seeming diversions into methodology by two political-economic philosophers help to shed light on their underlying assumptions about cost and rationality. We argue that Buchanan and Hayek, and consequently Public Choice and Austrian Economics, have very similar underlying assumptions about the nature of cost. This can help to explain other similarities between the two schools, especially regarding the role of the state. These contributions are synthesized and applied to debates over the “new paternalism” and military conscription.
Tom DiLorenzo’s 1990 paper “The Subjectivist Roots of James Buchanan’s Economics” is also worth consulting on this connection. The question, though, is whether Cost and Choice (and the later Buchanan and Thirlby-edited volume, LSE Essays on Cost) is a consistent with the rest of the public choice tradition (including Buchanan’s own work).
NB: In graduate school I was exposed to the “positive political theory” (PPT) literature associated with Riker, Shepsle, Weingast, etc. and was surprised that the Virginia school was never mentiond in the discussion. A prominent PPT scholar told me once that PPT is “scientific,” while public choice is merely “ideological” and “low-tech.” Fair or not, I think this view is widespread among younger scholars. Has anyone written a good comparison of PPT and the public-choice approach?
New Edition of Hayek’s Early Works
| Peter Klein |
The Mises Institute has just released a new edition of Hayek’s early works on economic theory, Prices and Production and Other Works: F. A. Hayek on Money, the Business Cycle, and the Gold Standard, edited and introduced by Joe Salerno. It collects the monographs Prices and Production, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, and Monetary Nationalism and International Stability, along with the important essays “The Paradox of Saving,” “Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J.M. Keynes,” “The Mythology of Capital,” and “Investment That Raises the Demand for Capital.” These works, written between 1929 and 1937, established Hayek’s reputation as one of the great technical economists of his day, and the leading opponent of Keynes in monetary and business-cycle theory. Ironically, Hayek is mostly known today for his popular writings, particularly The Road to Serfdom, and for his later work on knowledge, evolution, and social theory. It is often forgotten that he was first and foremost an economic theorist.
Here is a detailed Hayek bibliography (through 1982) compiled by Leonard Liggio. Here’s a biographical essay written by yours truly. Here is the home page of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (and a pointer to my favorite volume). And it’s never too early to begin preparations for this important holiday.
Update: By coincidence, Collected Works editor Bruce Caldwell was interviewed in today’s Carolina Journal about his new edition of The Road to Serfdom.
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