Friedrich August Wolf

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Today, May the eighth, is the birthday of F.A. Hayek, one of the greatest economists of the Austrian tradition. Hayek was born in 1899 in Vienna, so he would have been 115 years old today. Hayek was a student and a younger colleague of Ludwig von Mises at the University of Vienna, and he later taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, as well as University Freiburg in Germany. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, the only member of the Austrian School to be so honored. Hayek's early work dealt with business cycle theory. Hayek followed his mentor Ludwig von Mises in explaining business cycles in terms of monetary expansion and interference in the monetary system by the government. Hayek, like Mises, believed that a market economy did not generate booms and busts on its own. Other economists like John Maynard Keynes who was famous at the same time as Hayek. Keynes argued that market economies were inherently unstable and that government intervention in the monetary system in the fiscal policy was necessary to smooth out or stabilize the economy. Nowadays, the so-called keynesian consensus has fallen apart and people are increasingly concerned that the standard approach of government trying to fix the economy and stabilize the economy isn't working. And the ideas of great thinkers like Hayek have been rediscovered and are being taught again to students, and analyzed by policymakers and so just as Hayek's Nobel Prize in the 1970s helped to contribute to a revival of interest in the Austrian school itself. The financial crisis and the the failure of mainstream economist to predicted it and grapple with it, has led to a revival of interest in Hayek's business cycle theory and the works of Mises and Rothbard and others who argue that government intervention is the source of economic instability. Hayek was also a very important public intellectual, he wrote a book The Road to Serfdom intended for a popular audience, on problems and dangers of government interference in the economic system. The book was published in the nineteen forties and caused a huge sensation in the UK and then later in the US, and Hayek became a sort of media star. Around this time he also founded the Mont Pelerin Society, just after world war two. Very important organization of intellectuals and journalists and teachers devoted to classical liberalism and free market principles, and helped to have a substantial impact on public discourse in the 20th century. Hayek went on to do very important work in other fields: in law and philosophy, in political thought, and he has continued to be a great teacher and inspiration for Austrian economists and others studying the free market and the free-market legal system who came after him. So, at the Mises Institute we are inspired by the scholarship of great economists like Hayek. We try to follow in the footsteps of Hayek and Mises and the other great Austrians who were inspired by their scholarship and also by their courage in the face a great public opposition.