Well, first of all this part of this thread has become moot in that it has been made clear that the time horizon under consideration is the entire career of each of the individuals under consideration, which then presumably means that one should start with Hayek's socialist student days. That makes it unequivocal that indeed he is in the camp of those who became much more classically liberal, pretty much any way one wants to define these terms, or how one views some of the later twists and turns he took in his writings on a vast array of topics.
That said, I note that Doug M. is probably correct that Hayek's move to supporting free banking came (shortly) after Hayek's receipt of the Nobel Prize, although it seems nearly coincident, and this arguably is a "more classically liberal" move. I am not sure I would put too much weight on the praise of the anarchist book. After all, Keynes praised The Road to Serfdom, but nobody thereby argues too seriously that Keynes had turned into a Hayekian.
I would be foolish to get into a debate with Bruce Caldwell about the intellectual history of Hayek, although I find his characterization of the first edition of RtS as containing "rampant interventionism" as only defensible from a full-bore anarcho-capitalist perspective. I do not have a source on precisely how and in what ways Hayek's views of national health insurance changed, but I did check up on his son, Laurence. It turns out that he was indeed a physician and microbiologist in Britain who worked in the medical care system of that nation in a variety of ways over many decades. Without doubt his experiences would have influenced the elder Hayek's views, and the report I heard somewhere (possibly verbally from someone claiming to know), was that Laurence was unhappy with the functioning of the British health care system, leading to a more critical attitude on the part of his father, although I cannot name, and I do not think Bruce is saying there is any, clear statement late in his life regarding Hayek's precise views on the matter of national health insurance.
I would note that the British health care system is a particularly extreme version of such a system, pretty nearly full-blown socialized medicine, with most health care professionals actual employees of the state. This is not the case in most nations that have national health insurance, with Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland all offering examples of systems that have such universal coverage, that differ from each other, but in all of which the majority of health care professionals are not employees of the state (and I note that we have a socialist sub-sector of the US health care where they are, namely the VA system).
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Doug Mackenzie
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] policy view changes of Nobel Prize winners
Hayek endorsed the Anarcho-Capitalist book Defending the Undefendable (1976)
"Looking through Defending the Undefendable made me feel that I was once more exposed to the shock therapy by which, more than fifty years ago, the late Ludwig von Mises converted me to a consistent free market position. … Some may find it too strong a medicine, but it will still do them good even if they hate it. A real understanding of economics demands that one disabuses oneself of many dear prejudices and illusions. Popular fallacies in economics frequently express themselves in unfounded prejudices against other occupations, and showing the falsity of these stereotypes you are doing a real services, although you will not make yourself more popular with the majority."
Hayek also wrote Denationalizing Money after winning the Nobel. This was a movement towards laissez faire.
Hayek wrote some remark on how society would continue on without any government (though he did not recommend such a move)- not sure when or in which book offhand, but it might have been post-Nobel.
D.W. MacKenzie, Ph.D.
Carroll College, Helena MT
--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 8/29/13, Bruce Caldwell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Subject: Re: [SHOE] policy view changes of Nobel Prize winners
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Thursday, August 29, 2013, 7:52 AM
Regarding Hayek, in the intro to the
1976 reprint of Serfdom he says
"Where I now feel I was wrong in this book is... that I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think
unwarranted." Being Hayek, he did not elaborate what those concessions were, so I am less confident than is Barkley in being able to identify them. But it does seem that he moved away from the rampant interventionism so evident in his radically interventionist Road to Serfdom! (I am channeling Mises here...) So I would say he could be included in at least the "little" or "notably" changed camp.
I suppose
if one goes back to his socialist student days, he might be in the "quite significantly" camp, but that seems like a stretch to me.
Friedman was certainly more interventionist in the 1930s than he was later, at least concerning constraining corporations.
Bruce
On 8/26/2013 1:18 PM, Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
wrote:
> My quick reply is that some of those labeled as having grown much more classically liberal after their trips to Stockholm were already very classically liberal and I am unaware of much specifically further movement in that direction afterwards. Several of those in that category of much more may fit, but the one that really sticks out is Hayek. About the only way I can think of that he might have become more classically liberal was in his view of health care policy, where he may have become more anti-national health insurance after 1974. Otherwise, if anything it could be argued he moved in the opposite direction, particularly if one takes a Misesian hard line that his open turn against a priorism and more strongly towards an evolutionary perspective (which he had been already moving towards for some time) made him "less classically liberal," although obviously that is a highly debatable matter.
>
> Barkley Rosser
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Pedro Teixeira [[log in to unmask]] > Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 11:30 AM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [SHOE] policy view changes of Nobel Prize winners > > Dear David, > > I wonder if you could be more explicit about the criteria used to classify one scholar as notably or only a little or significantly.
> Although I understand that there is an inevitable degree of subjectivity involved in these assessments, I think our reply to your questions is largely conditioned by those criteria.
> I also wonder what was the reason to exclude authors such as Gary Becker, Joseph Stiglitz, or Gunnar Myrdal.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Pedro
>
> Pedro Nuno Teixeira
> Director - CIPES, Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies - www.cipes.up.pt > Associate Professor - Faculty of Economics, University of Porto - www.fep.up.pt > > On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 7:35 AM, Colander, David C.
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
wrote:
> I playing the role of overseer of a project organized by Dan Klein to consider the intellectual migration of Nobel Prize winning economist’s policy views. The project will be published in the journal, Econ Journal Watch, in September. What “overseer” means is that I am a type of referee before publication, and my job is to keep him honest, and see that his analysis is not overly influenced by his political views. His goal with the project, is to see which Nobel Prize winning economists can be classified as having become more or less classical liberal. Classical liberal is, of course, a difficult term to define, but what he means by classical liberal is a presumption in policy judgment away from government involvement and toward letting the market handle it. Given this definition, he has tentatively come up with the following readings for 16
laureates:
>
>
> Laureates Who Grew
> Either More or Less
> Classical Liberal
>
>
>
>
> Grew
> More Classical Liberal
>
>
>
> Quite significantly
>
>
> James Buchanan
> Ronald Coase
> Robert Fogel
> Friedrich Hayek
> Franco Modigliani
> Douglass North
> Vernon Smith
>
>
>
> Notably
>
>
>
> Theodore Schultz
>
>
>
> Only a little
>
>
>
> Kenneth Arrow
> Milton Friedman
> Eric Maskin
> (Edmund Phelps?)
> George Stigler
>
>
>
>
>
> Grew
> Less
> Classical
> Liberal
>
>
> Quite significantly
>
>
>
> Ragnar Frisch
> Bertil Ohlin
>
>
> Notably
>
>
>
> Peter Diamond
>
>
> Only a little
>
>
>
> Paul Krugman
>
>
> Please note that Dan's placements are still tentative.
He and I fully recognize that there are many different definitions of classical liberal that one could use, and I am not asking people to comment on those definitions here.
(I will comment on it at length in my contribution to his
project.) But I would be interested in the list’s views about the movements he has found. Specifically, I have two questions:
> 1. Do any of his classifications stand out as not fitting your expectations?
> 2. Are there other Nobel Prize
winners who you would see as having moved in their policy views that should be included in the list?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dave
>
> David Colander
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> 802-443-5302<tel:802-443-5302>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mario J. Rizzo
> NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
> Department of Economics
> 19 West 4th Street,
> Seventh Floor (725)
> New York, NY 10012
> 212-998-8932 (telephone, e-mail preferred) > 212-995-4186 (fax) > > Personal website: http://works.bepress.com/mario_rizzo
>
> Colloquium: http://econ.as.nyu.edu/object/econ.event.colloquium
>
> Blog: http://thinkmarkets.wordpress.com > > Book Series: http://www.routledge.com/books/series/Routledge_Foundations_of_the_Market_Economy/
--
Bruce Caldwell
Research Professor of Economics
Director, Center for the History of Political Economy
"To discover a reference has often taken hours of labour, to
fail to discover one has often taken days." Edwin Cannan, on
editing Smith's Wealth of Nations
Address:
Department of Economics
Duke University
Box 90097
Durham, N.C. 27708
Office: Room 07G Social Sciences Building
Phone: 919-660-6896
Center website: http://hope.econ.duke.edu
Personal Website: http://econ.duke.edu/~bjc18/
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