Friedrich A. Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek was born on 8 May 1899 in Vienna. After the First World War he studied at the University of Vienna, earning doctorates in law (1921) and political science (1923); his teacher was Friedrich von Wieser. As he later recalled, Ludwig von Mises’s Die Gemeinwirtschaft (1922, later translated as Socialism) turned him away from socialism, and he became a regular member of Mises’s private seminar.

From 1927 to 1931 he directed the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, which he had founded with Mises. In Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929) and Prices and Production (1931) he developed Mises’s theory: when credit expansion pushes the rate of interest below its “natural” level, the structure of production is distorted and the boom ends in a bust. In 1931 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he taught until 1950 and debated Keynes.

In 1944 he published The Road to Serfdom, arguing that central planning of the economy leads to the loss of freedom. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) he showed that market prices convey knowledge that exists in no single mind. In 1947 he founded the Mont Pèlerin Society. He taught at Chicago (1950–1962) and Freiburg (from 1962) and wrote, among other books, The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–1979).

In 1974 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal, for their work on the theory of money and economic fluctuations. In Denationalisation of Money (1976) he proposed allowing competing private currencies instead of the state monopoly. He died on 23 March 1992 in Freiburg. According to the Mises Institute, he was a founding board member of the Institute.

Sources: Nobel Prize — Friedrich August von Hayek, Biographical · Nobel Prize — The Sveriges Riksbank Prize 1974 · Mises Institute — Friedrich A. Hayek · Wikipedia — Friedrich Hayek