Henry Hazlitt
Journalist and economist · Economics in One Lesson
Henry Hazlitt was born on 28 November 1894 in Philadelphia. He went to work young, in 1913, at The Wall Street Journal. He was literary editor of The Nation (1930–1933), succeeded H. L. Mencken as editor of The American Mercury (1933–1934), and until 1946 wrote editorials for The New York Times.
In 1944 his New York Times review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom helped make the book widely known in the United States. In 1946 he published Economics in One Lesson, a short introduction to economics for the general reader. The “one lesson” is to look not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any policy, and not merely for one group but for all groups; its second chapter, “The Broken Window”, retells Bastiat’s example.
From 1946 to 1966 he wrote the “Business Tides” column for Newsweek. In 1946 he took part, with Leonard E. Read, in founding the Foundation for Economic Education, and in 1947 he was an original member of the Mont Pèlerin Society; he co-edited The Freeman (1950–1953). His other books include The Failure of the “New Economics” (1959), a critique of Keynes’s General Theory, and The Foundations of Morality (1964).
Ludwig von Mises called him “the economic conscience of our country and of our nation”. He died on 9 July 1993 in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Sources: Mises Institute — Henry Hazlitt · Foundation for Economic Education — Henry Hazlitt · Wikipedia — Henry Hazlitt