148 Facts About Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek earned doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and political science in 1923 from the University of Vienna.

Friedrich Hayek subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany.

Friedrich Hayek is widely considered a major contributor to the Austrian School of Economics.

Friedrich Hayek had considerable influence on a variety of political movements of the 20th century, and his ideas continue to influence thinkers from a variety of political backgrounds today.

Friedrich Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1984 for his academic contributions to economics.

Friedrich Hayek was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984.

Friedrich Hayek's father, born in 1871 in Vienna, was a medical doctor employed by the municipal ministry of health.

Friedrich Hayek was the oldest of three brothers, Heinrich and Erich, who were one-and-a-half and five years younger than he was.

Friedrich Hayek wrote works in the field of biological systematics, some of which are relatively well known.

On his mother's side, Friedrich Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Friedrich Hayek was related to Wittgenstein on the non-Jewish side of the Wittgenstein family.

The surname Friedrich Hayek uses the German spelling of the Czech surname Hajek.

Friedrich Hayek traced his ancestry to an ancestor with the surname "Hagek" who came from Prague.

Friedrich Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age and read fluently and frequently before going to school.

Friedrich Hayek was at the bottom of his class in most subjects and once received three failing grades, in Latin, Greek and mathematics.

Friedrich Hayek was very interested in theater, even attempting to write some tragedies, and biology, regularly helping his father with his botanical work.

Friedrich Hayek noted Goethe as the greatest early intellectual influence.

In school, Friedrich Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics.

In 1917, Friedrich Hayek joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front.

Friedrich Hayek suffered damage to his hearing in his left ear during the war and was decorated for bravery.

Friedrich Hayek then decided to pursue an academic career, determined to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war.

At the University of Vienna, Friedrich Hayek initially studied mostly philosophy, psychology and economics.

Friedrich Hayek earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively.

Friedrich Hayek presented his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.

Between 1923 and 1924, Friedrich Hayek worked as a research assistant to Professor Jeremiah Jenks of New York University, compiling macroeconomic data on the American economy and the operations of the Federal Reserve.

Friedrich Hayek was influenced by Wesley Clair Mitchell and started a doctoral program on problems of monetary stabilization but didn't finish it.

Friedrich Hayek had very limited social contacts, missed the cultural life of Vienna, and was troubled by his poverty.

Friedrich Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading von Mises' book Socialism.

In 1932, Friedrich Hayek suggested that private investment in the public markets was a better road to wealth and economic co-ordination in Britain than government spending programs as argued in an exchange of letters with John Maynard Keynes, co-signed with Lionel Robbins and others in The Times.

Keynes called Friedrich Hayek's book Prices and Production "one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read", famously adding: "It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam".

Friedrich Hayek taught or tutored many other LSE students, including David Rockefeller.

Unwilling to return to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the control of Nazi Germany in 1938, Friedrich Hayek remained in Britain.

Friedrich Hayek held this status for the remainder of his life, but he did not live in Great Britain after 1950.

Friedrich Hayek lived in the United States from 1950 to 1962 and then mostly in Germany, but briefly in Austria.

In 1947, Friedrich Hayek was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Friedrich Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction to socialism and The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns.

Friedrich Hayek's salary was funded not by the university, but by an outside foundation, the William Volker Fund.

Friedrich Hayek had made contact with many at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, with Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom playing a seminal role in transforming how Milton Friedman and others understood how society works.

Friedrich Hayek conducted a number of influential faculty seminars while at the University of Chicago and a number of academics worked on research projects sympathetic to some of Friedrich Hayek's own, such as Aaron Director, who was active in the Chicago School in helping to fund and establish what became the "Law and Society" program in the University of Chicago Law School.

Friedrich Hayek completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960.

Friedrich Hayek was concerned that "with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society".

Friedrich Hayek was disappointed that the book did not receive the same enthusiastic general reception as The Road to Serfdom had sixteen years before.

Friedrich Hayek left Chicago mostly because of financial reasons, being concerned about his pension provisions.

Friedrich Hayek regularly spent summers in Austrian Alps, usually in the Tyrolean village Obergurgl where he enjoyed mountain climbing, and visited Japan four times with additional trips to Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Australia, New Caledonia and Ceylon.

Preliminary drafts of the book were completed by 1970, but Friedrich Hayek chose to rework his drafts and finally brought the book to publication in three volumes in 1973,1976 and 1979.

Friedrich Hayek became a professor at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977 and then returned to Freiburg.

When Friedrich Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote: "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg".

On 9 October 1974, it was announced that Friedrich Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, with the reasons for selection being listed in a press release.

Friedrich Hayek was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The Sveriges-Riksbank Nobel Prize in Economics was established in 1968, and Friedrich Hayek was the first non-Keynesian economist to win it.

Friedrich Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom.

Friedrich Hayek spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger the authority of the prize would lend to an economist, but the prize brought much greater public awareness to the then controversial ideas of Hayek and was described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life".

Besides Thatcher, Friedrich Hayek made a significant influence on Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and John Biffen.

Friedrich Hayek gained some controversy in 1978 by praising Thatcher's anti-immigration policy proposal in an article which ignited numerous accusations of anti-Semitism and racism because of his reflections on the inability of assimilation of Eastern European Jews in the Vienna of his youth.

Friedrich Hayek defended himself by explaining that he made no racial judgements, only highlighted the problems of acculturation.

Friedrich Hayek was criticised by Liberal politicians Gladwyn Jebb and Andrew Phillips, who both claimed that the purpose of the pact was to discourage socialist legislation.

In 1978, Friedrich Hayek came into conflict with Liberal Party leader David Steel, who claimed that liberty was possible only with "social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth and power, which in turn require a degree of active government intervention" and that the Conservative Party were more concerned with the connection between liberty and private enterprise than between liberty and democracy.

Friedrich Hayek claimed that a limited democracy might be better than other forms of limited government at protecting liberty, but that an unlimited democracy was worse than other forms 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".

Friedrich Hayek stated that if the Conservative leader had 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 supported Britain in the Falklands War, writing that it would be justified to attack Argentinian territory instead of just defending the islands, which earned him a lot of criticism in Argentina, a country which he visited several times.

Friedrich Hayek supported Ronald Reagan's decision to keep high defence spending, believing that a strong US military is a guarantee of world peace and necessary to keep the Soviet Union under control.

In 1980, Friedrich Hayek was one of twelve Nobel laureates to meet with Pope John Paul II "to dialogue, discuss views in their fields, communicate regarding the relationship between Catholicism and science, and 'bring to the Pontiff's attention the problems which the Nobel Prize Winners, in their respective fields of study, consider to be the most urgent for contemporary man'".

Friedrich Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday Honours by Elizabeth II on the advice of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics".

When later that evening Friedrich Hayek was dropped off at the Reform Club, he commented: "I've just had the happiest day of my life".

Friedrich Hayek died on 23 March 1992, aged 92, in Freiburg, Germany and was buried on 4 April in the Neustift am Walde cemetery in the northern outskirts of Vienna according to the Catholic rite.

Friedrich Hayek used this body of work as a starting point for his own interpretation of the business cycle, elaborating what later became known as the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

Friedrich Hayek spelled out the Austrian approach in more detail in his book, published in 1929, an English translation of which appeared in 1933 as Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle.

Friedrich Hayek claimed that "the past instability of the market economy is the consequence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process".

Friedrich Hayek's analysis was based on Eugen Bohm von Bawerk's concept of the "average period of production" and on the effects that monetary policy could have upon it.

Eager to promote alternatives to what he regarded as the narrow approach of the school of economic thought that then dominated the English-speaking academic world, Robbins invited Friedrich Hayek to join the faculty at LSE, which he did in 1931.

Friedrich Hayek never produced the book-length treatment of "the dynamics of capital" that he had promised in the Pure Theory of Capital.

At the University of Chicago, Friedrich Hayek was not part of the economics department and did not influence the rebirth of neoclassical theory that took place there.

In 1935, Friedrich Hayek published Collectivist Economic Planning, a collection of essays from an earlier debate that had been initiated by Mises.

Friedrich Hayek included Mises's essay in which Mises argued that rational planning was impossible under socialism.

In "The Use of Knowledge in Society", Friedrich Hayek argued that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronise local and personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse and complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization.

Friedrich Hayek contrasted the use of the price mechanism with central planning, arguing that the former allows for more rapid adaptation to changes in particular circumstances of time and place.

Friedrich Hayek used the term catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation".

Friedrich Hayek made breakthroughs in the choice theory, and examined the inter-relations between non-permanent production goods and "latent" or potentially economic permanent resources, building on the choice theoretical insight that "processes that take more time will evidently not be adopted unless they yield a greater return than those that take less time".

Friedrich Hayek's goal was to show how a number of then-popular doctrines and beliefs had a common origin in some fundamental misconceptions about the social science.

In Counter-Revolution, for example, Friedrich Hayek observed that the hard sciences attempt to remove the "human factor" to obtain objective and strictly controlled results:.

Friedrich Hayek posited two orders, namely the sensory order that we experience and the natural order that natural science revealed.

Friedrich Hayek thought that the sensory order actually is a product of the brain.

Friedrich Hayek described the brain as a very complex yet self-ordering hierarchical classification system, a huge network of connections.

Friedrich Hayek's description posed problems to behaviorism, whose proponents took the sensory order as fundamental.

Friedrich Hayek joined several pan-European and pro-federalist movements throughout his career, and called for federal ties between the UK and Europe, and between Europe and the United States.

Friedrich Hayek argued that closer economic ties without closer political ties would lead to more problems because interest groups in nation-states would best be able to counter the internationalization of markets that comes with closer economic ties by appealing to nationalism.

Friedrich Hayek argued that such a world government should do little more than act as a negative check on national sovereignties and serve as a focal point for collective defense.

Yet Friedrich Hayek never disavowed his famous call for "the abrogation of national sovereignties" and his lifetime of work in the area of international relations continues to attract attention from scholars searching for federalist answers to contemporary problems in international relations.

Friedrich Hayek argues in favour of a society organised around a market order in which the apparatus of state is employed almost exclusively to enforce the legal order necessary for a market of free individuals to function.

Friedrich Hayek argued that his ideal individualistic and free-market polity would be self-regulating to such a degree that it would be "a society which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it".

Friedrich Hayek compared the market to a game in which "there is no point in calling the outcome just or unjust" and argued that "social justice is an empty phrase with no determinable content".

Friedrich Hayek was one of the leading academic critics of collectivism in the 20th century.

Friedrich Hayek posited that a central planning authority would have to be endowed with powers that would impact and ultimately control social life because the knowledge required for centrally planning an economy is inherently decentralised, and would need to be brought under control.

Friedrich Hayek wrote that the state can play a role in the economy, specifically in creating a safety net, saying:.

Friedrich Hayek viewed the free price system not as a conscious invention, but as spontaneous order or what Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson referred to as "the result of human action but not of human design".

For instance, Friedrich Hayek put the price mechanism on the same level as language, which he developed in his price signal theory.

Friedrich Hayek attributed the birth of civilisation to private property in his book The Fatal Conceit.

Friedrich Hayek explained that price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other to solve the economic calculation problem.

Critical theorist Bernard Harcourt has argued further that "Friedrich Hayek was adamant about this".

The human mind, Friedrich Hayek says, is not just limited in its ability to synthesize a vast array of concrete facts, it is limited in its ability to give a deductively sound ground to ethics.

Friedrich Hayek is an intellectual skeptic who wants to give political philosophy a secure intellectual foundation.

Friedrich Hayek sent Antonio de Oliveira Salazar a copy of The Constitution of Liberty in 1962.

Friedrich Hayek visited Chile in the 1970s and 1980s during the Government Junta of general Augusto Pinochet and accepted being appointed Honorary Chairman of the Centro de Estudios Publicos, the think tank formed by the economists who transformed Chile into a free market economy.

For example, when Friedrich Hayek visited Venezuela in May 1981, he was asked to comment on the prevalence of totalitarian regimes in Latin America.

Friedrich Hayek claimed that democracy can be repressive and totalitarian; in The Constitution of Liberty he often refers to Jacob Talmon's concept of totalitarian democracy.

Friedrich Hayek was skeptical about international immigration and supported Thatcher's anti-immigration policies.

Friedrich Hayek was mainly preoccupied with practical problems concerning immigration:.

Friedrich Hayek was not sympathetic to nationalist ideas and was afraid that mass immigration might revive nationalist sentiment among domestic population and ruin the postwar progress that was made among Western nations.

Friedrich Hayek claimed that his attitude is not based on any racial feeling.

Friedrich Hayek made negative comments about awarding the Prize to Ralph Bunche, Albert Luthuli, and his LSE colleague W Arthur Lewis who he described as an "unusually able West Indian negro".

In 1978 Friedrich Hayek made a month-long visit to South Africa where he gave numerous lectures, interviews, and met prominent politicians and business leaders, unconcerned about possible propagandistic effect of his tour for Apartheid regime.

Friedrich Hayek expressed his opposition to some of the government policies, believing that publicly funded institutions should treat all citizens equally, but claimed that private institutions have the right to discriminate.

Friedrich Hayek claimed that the idea that "all men are born equal" is untrue because evolution and genetic differences have created "boundless variety of human nature".

Friedrich Hayek emphasized the importance of nature, complaining that it became too fashionable to ascribe all human differences to environment.

Friedrich Hayek contrasted individuals who inherited wealth, with upper class values and education, with the nouveau riche who often use their wealth in more vulgar ways.

Friedrich Hayek decried the disappearance of such leisured aristocratic class, claiming that contemporary Western elites are usually business groups that lack intellectual leadership and coherent "philosophy of life" and use their wealth mostly for economic purposes.

Friedrich Hayek was against high taxes on inheritance, believing that it is natural function of the family to transmit standards, traditions and material goods.

Friedrich Hayek was strongly against progressive taxation, noting that in most countries additional taxes paid by the rich amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue and that the only major result of the policy is "gratification of the envy of the less-well-off".

Friedrich Hayek claimed that it is contrary to idea of equality under law and against democratic principle that majority should not impose discriminatory rules against minority.

Friedrich Hayek's work has attracted criticism from a variety of sources.

However, others have argued this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the book and Friedrich Hayek's point is about what central planning directly entails, not what it is likely to lead to.

Friedrich Hayek wrote critically there of the field of orthodox economics and neo-classical modelisation.

Friedrich Hayek is widely recognised for having introduced the time dimension to the equilibrium construction and for his key role in helping inspire the fields of growth theory, information economics and the theory of spontaneous order.

Friedrich Hayek was instrumental in the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the right-wing libertarian and free-market think tank that inspired Thatcherism.

Friedrich Hayek was in addition a member of the conservative and libertarian Philadelphia Society.

Friedrich Hayek had a long-standing and close friendship with philosopher of science Karl Popper, who was from Vienna.

Friedrich Hayek played a central role in Milton Friedman's intellectual development.

Friedrich Hayek deeply disagreed with Chicago School methodology, quantitative and macroeconomic focus, and claimed that Friedman's Essays in Positive Economics was as dangerous a book as Keynes' General Theory.

Friedman claimed that despite some Popperian influence Friedrich Hayek always retained basic Misesian praxeological view which he found "utterly nonsensical".

Friedrich Hayek noted that he admired Hayek only for his political works, and disagreed with his technical economics; he called Prices and Production a "very flawed book" and The Pure Theory of Capital "unreadable".

Friedrich Hayek had a wide-reaching influence on contemporary economics, politics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology.

Friedrich Hayek received new attention in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of conservative governments in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

Friedrich Hayek wrote an essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative".

Friedrich Hayek was much more critical of conservativism in continental Europe which he saw as more similar to socialism.

European conservatives, according to Friedrich Hayek, are similar to socialists in their belief that social and political problems can be solved by placing right people in governmental positions and giving them the opportunity to rule without much restrictions.

Friedrich Hayek disliked what he saw as a conservative tendency to obscurantism, such as rejection of theory of evolution and naturalistic explanations of life because of moral consequences that follow from them.

Friedrich Hayek opposed conservatism for "its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism", with its frequent association with imperialism.

Friedrich Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition and the term "libertarian" was used instead.

Friedrich Hayek found libertarianism as a term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term "Old Whig" instead.

In line with Friedrich Hayek, an increasing number of contemporary researchers sees expansionary monetary policies and too low interest rates as mal-incentives and main drivers of financial crises in general and the subprime market crisis in particular.

Friedrich Hayek's ideas find their way into the discussion of the post-Great Recession issues of secular stagnation.

Friedrich Hayek's books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Friedrich Hayek's daughter Christine was an entomologist at the British Museum of Natural History, and she cared for him during his last years, when he had declining health.

Friedrich Hayek had a lifelong interest in biology and was concerned with ecology and environmental protection.

Friedrich Hayek had an interest in epistemology, which he often applied to his own thinking, as a social scientist.

Friedrich Hayek held that methodological differences in the social sciences and in natural sciences were key to understanding why incompetent policies are often allowed.

Friedrich Hayek was brought up in a non-religious setting and decided from age 15 that he was an agnostic.

Friedrich Hayek died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Chicago in 1961.