Friedrich Hayek | |||||||
F. A. Hayek was a Nobel-winning Austrian economist renowned for both his popular arguments against collectivism in The Road to Serfdom On the basis of his work on the business cycle encapsulated in Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, Hayek was offered a presitigious professorship at the University of London, where he wrote The Road to Serfdom and conducted a famous debate with John Maynard Keynes. Hayek's key insights included a recognition that, because knowledge is dispersed and depends on time, place, and context, no central authority could acquire all the knowledge required to plan an economy. He also sought to better understand a phenomenon first identified by philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment - that of spontaneous orders. Many orders such as languages, Hayek noted, are not constructed by a central authority. Instead, millions of individuals acting on their own create an ordered way of communication with one another. Hayek moved to the University of Chicago in 1950, where he wrote The Constitution of Liberty Related Links The London School of Economics Hayek Society The Friedrich Hayek Scholar's Page The Use of Knowledge in Society Curriculum Vitae of Friedrich August von Hayek Resources by Friedrich Hayek The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism |
and his scholarly work on the business cycle, the function of prices and the nature of spontaneously emerging social orders. Hayek studied economics at the University of Vienna under Wieser and later under Mises in the Austrian bureaucracy and at the Institute for Business Cycle Research, which he helped Mises to found.