Friedrich Hayek: Doing

Friedrich Hayek was Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Friedrich Hayek: 158   quotes 7   likes

“The advice I would give is: If you have the courage to do so, don't feel patriotic in monetary matters. Choose the money which helps you best.”

Friedrich Hayek

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

Money , Feeling , Courage , Help

“We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others.”

Friedrich Hayek

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

Family , Intelligence

“Perhaps I'm unrealistic. As long as people do not fully realize the danger of inflation, they may well pressure for more inflation as a short-term remedy for evils. Though we may well be driven into more, until people have learned the lesson, but that means that inflation may still do more of a great deal of harm, before it will be cured.”

Friedrich Hayek

1975 interview https://mises.org/library/hayek-meets-press-1975 on "Meet the Press."
1960s–1970s

People , Learning , Evil

“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”

Friedrich Hayek

in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan
1980s and later

Men , People , World , Family

“Those communities who adopted the new rules and, in doing so, infringed upon deeply embedded natural feelings became the successful ones, the ones who multiplied because they were more prosperous and were able to attract people from other groups.”

Friedrich Hayek

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

People , Feeling , Communication , Nature

“A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot.”

Friedrich Hayek

Letter to The Times http://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/hayek-letter-to-the-times-july-11-1978.pdf (11 July 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s

Exercises , Democracy , Thinking , Freedom

“On the scale on which [tax cutting] is being tried, I'm a little apprehensive. I'm all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do.”

Friedrich Hayek

in "Business People; A Nobel Winner Assesses Reagan", The New York Times (1 December 1982)
1980s and later

“What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.”

Friedrich Hayek

Source: 1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 6.

“And since any inflation, however modest at first, can help employment only so long as it accelerates, adopted as a means of reducing unemployment, it will do so for any length of time only while it accelerates. "Mild" steady inflation cannot help—it can lead only to outright inflation. That inflation at a constant rate soon ceases to have any stimulating effect, and in the end merely leaves us with a backlog of delayed adaptations, is the conclusive argument against the "mild" inflation represented as beneficial even in standard economics textbooks.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s Unemployment and the Unions: Essays on the Impotent Price Structure of Britain and Monopoly in the Labour Market https://books.google.com/books?id=zZu3AAAAIAAJ&q=%22only+while+it+accelerates%22&dq=%22only+while+it+accelerates%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HBhsUYjUGMv34QSW-YDgDg&redir_esc=y (1984)
1980s and later

Time , Help

“The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever.”

Friedrich Hayek

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

World , Mathematics , Appearance

“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

“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 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