Hayek: A Collaborative Biography : Part XV: The Chicago School of Economics, Hayek’s ‘luck’ and the 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science Hardback

Edited by Robert Leeson

Part of the Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics series

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On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the ‘International Right’.

Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President. Pivotal to the ‘turn to the Right’ was Friedrich ‘von’ Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: ‘For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.’The evidence suggests that Hayek’s fraudulent assertion was uncovered at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s – but not reported.

The most likely explanation is self-censorship - for reasons of ideological correctness, fund raising and residual deference to the Second Estate.

Four indirect tests suggest that ‘free’ market economists have - in other instances and presumably for fund-raising motives - suppressed embarrassing ‘knowledge’: which suggests that they were perfectly capable of suppressing ‘knowledge’ about Hayek’s non-prediction of the Great Depression. With respect to the Nobel Prize and thus his ability to reach a wider audience, Hayek was fortune in having two loyal ‘intermediaries’: Lionel Robbins and Fritz Machlup who were – and probably felt themselves to be – ‘socially’ inferior to ‘von’ Hayek.