Friedrich Hayek: Trending quotes (page 4)

“If craftsmen and blacksmiths were feared for transforming material substance, if traders were feared for transforming such intangible qualities as value, how much more will the banker be feared for the transformations he effects with the most abstract and immaterial of all economic institutions? Thus we reach the climax of the progressive replacement of the perceivable and concrete by abstract concepts shaping rules guiding activity: money and its institutions seem to be beyond the boundary of laudable and understandable physical efforts of creation, in a realm where the comprehension of the concrete ceases and incomprehensible abstractions rule.”

Friedrich Hayek

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p.102

Money , Fear , Understanding , Effort

“I believe you will be shocked by my stating this so bluntly because we are still guided instinctively by those inherited "natural" emotions… in a sense we are all socialist.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "The Reactionary Nature of the Socialist Conception"

Nature , Sense

“Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.”

Friedrich Hayek

Source: 1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 99.

Men , Justice

“There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. The average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed.”

Friedrich Hayek

"Trade Unions — The Biggest Obstacle", Economic Affairs (October 1980)
1980s and later

Chance

“We have found a method of creating an order of human co–operation which far exceeds the limits of our knowledge. We are led to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware. We do not know the needs which we satisfy, nor do we know the sources of the things which we get. We stand in an enormous framework into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we have never made and never understood, but which have their reason.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Our Moral Heritage"

Knowledge

“She was a very good-looking woman, and extremely intelligent. But she wasn’t really very female; she had too much of a male intelligence.”

Friedrich Hayek

Conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNwceWargfs&feature=youtu.be&t=2m10s with Alchian (1978); About Vera Lutz, published in Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek https://archive.org/details/nobelprizewinnin00haye (1983), p. 363
1960s–1970s

Intelligence

“The reasons why the adoption of a system of central planning necessarily produces a totalitarian system are fairly simple. Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve. As under modern conditions control of economic activity means control of the material means for practically all our ends, it means control over nearly all our activities. The nature of the detailed scale of values which must guide the planning makes it impossible that it should be determined by anything like democratic means. The director of the planned system would have to impose his scale of values, his hierarchy of ends, which, if it is to be sufficient to determine the plan, must include a definite order of rank in which the status of each person is laid down. If the plan is to succeed or the planner to appear successful, the people must be made to believe that the objectives chosen are the right ones. Every criticism of the plan or the ideology underlying it must be treated as sabotage. There can be no freedom of thought, no freedom of the Press, where it is necessary that everything should be governed by a single system of thought. In theory Socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried thought must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism, and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism, the ruthless execution of the principle that 'the whole comes before the individual' and the direction of all members of society by a single will supposed to represent the 'whole.”

Friedrich Hayek

" Planning, Science and Freedom http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v148/n3759/abs/148580a0.html", Nature 148 (15 November 1941), also available as " Planning, Science, and Freedom https://mises.org/library/planning-science-and-freedom," Mises Daily (Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 27 September 2010)
1940s–1950s

People , Communication , Nature , Freedom

“The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced.It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics.The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance"
Source: http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/coping-with-ignorance/

Understanding , Time , Way

“My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. The approach to this problem has been blocked by a cost or labor theory of value, which assumes that prices are determined by the technical conditions of production only. The important question is to explain how the interaction of a great number of people, each possessing only limited knowledge, will bring about an order that could only be achieved by deliberate direction taken by somebody who has the combined knowledge of all these individuals. However, central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form. In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals.
Given this context, it is intellectually not satisfactory to attempt to establish causal relations between aggregates or averages in the manner in which the discipline of macroeconomics has attempted to do. Individuals do not make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge of magnitudes such as the total amount of production, or the total quantity of money. Aggregative theorizing leads nowhere.”

Friedrich Hayek

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Money , People , Idea , Question

“I mean, it became particularly acute because Keynes, against his intentions, had stimulated the development of macroeconomics. And I was convinced that not only his particular conclusions, but the whole foundation of macroeconomics was wrong.
So I wanted to demonstrate that we had to return to microeconomics, that this whole prejudice supported by the natural scientists that could deduce anything from measurable magnitudes, the effects of aggregates and averages, came to fascinate me much more. I felt in a way, that the thing which I am now prepared to do, I don’t know as there’s anybody else who can do this particular task. And I rather hoped that what I had done in capital theory would be continued by others. This was a new opening which was much more fascinating. The other would have meant working for a result which I already knew, but had to prove it. Which was very dull.
The other thing was an open problem: How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction. That was so much more fascinating as an intellectual problem.”

Friedrich Hayek

In a 1985 interview with Gary North and Mark Skousen, in Hayek on Hayek (1994)
1980s and later

Hope , Way , Support , Nature

“I am now profoundly convinced of what I had only hinted at before, namely, that the struggle between the advocates of a free society and the advocates of the socialist system is not a moral but an intellectual conflict. Thus socialists have been led by a very peculiar development to revive certain primitive instincts and feelings which in the course of hundreds of years had been practically suppressed by commercial or mercantile morals, which by the middle of the last century had come to govern the world economy.”

Friedrich Hayek

" The Moral Imperative of the Market https://mises.org/library/moral-imperative-market", in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon (1986)
1980s and later

World , Feeling

“There is no doubt, and in this I agree with Milton Friedman, that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression. One consequence of this policy was, of course, the fact that confidence was destroyed.”

Friedrich Hayek

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Confidence

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Science and Socialism"
Source: http://www.aei.org/publication/a-conversation-with-friedrich-a-von-hayek/

Understanding , Parting , History , Sense

“The mechanism by which the interaction of democratic decisions and their implementation by the experts often produces results which nobody has desired is a subject which would deserve much more careful attention than it usually receives.”

Friedrich Hayek

Lecture I. Freedom and the Rule of Law: A Historical Survey - 1. Principles and Drift in Democratic Process
1940s–1950s, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)

Decision

“When I look at the world, I sometimes feel that here in Germany one may still be in some sort of lifeboat that can hope to keep afloat when the rest of the world goes bust. German and Switzerland and perhaps Austria and Belgium have the few relatively stable currencies in the world.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, Interview in Silver & Gold Report (1980)

World , Hope , Feeling

“It seems to me that the future of peaceful international relations and the safety of persons in foreign countries would have been much better served if, after the Iranian Government placed itself outside the community of nations by approving the holding captive of the personnel of the United States embassy, the United States Government had at once sent an ultimatum saying that, unless every single member of the embassy staff were within 48 hours handed over unharmed to representatives of the United States Government at some place outside Iran, bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian Government.”

Friedrich Hayek

On the Iran hostage crisis; letter to The Times (12 January 1980), p. 13
1980s and later

Peace , Country , Personality , Future

“The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”

Friedrich Hayek

Law, Legislation and Liberty, volume 3, chapter 3, p. 55 https://books.google.pt/books?id=nclLLOfnGqAC&pg=PA55 (1979)
1960s–1970s, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979)

Appearance , Parting

“The treatment of the South Tirolese by the Italians, even before the advent of Fascism worse than anything known until then in modern times in any part of Western or Central Europe, has made the population more unwilling than ever to endure it further.”

Friedrich Hayek

Protesting against the Allies' decision to hand South Tyrol back to Italy; letter to The Times (22 December 1945), p. 5
1940s–1950s

Time , Parting

“I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.”

Friedrich Hayek

Exclusive Interview with F.A. Hayek by James U. Blanchard III, in Cato Policy Report (May/June 1984)
1980s and later

Money , Way