Austria

Nobel prize winner Friedrich von Hayek writes about the role of the State, liberalism, and socialism, about what makes a great economist, also competition, economics, and the freedom to undertake. From the 1930s onwards, Hayek was a staunch adversary of socialist planning. He argues that, as the economy is constantly changing, even the information that is quantifiable will be obsolete by the time it has been processed by the central planner. Furthermore, the information needed is too vast, too complex, and dispersed across society, what has become known as Hayek’s ‘knowledge problem’. Only the market is capable of capturing and bringing together the fragmented knowledge of the various members of society and doing the work of the planner in real time. He criticises the establishment of a Nobel Prize in economics. He resurrected the archaic term “demarchy” to describe what he saw as potential threat to the market order. For Hayek: “Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man” for Hans Selye, who coined the term stress and conceptualised its physiology, money has no value in itself. Hayek has these words of warning: “The contention that only the peculiar wickedness of the Germans has produced the Nazi system is likely to become the excuse for forcing on us the very institutions which have produced that wickedness”.