J.B.,

	Thank you for clarifying.  What with A citing B's comments on C it
is easy to get mixed up on who is speaking, and to what point.
	It is all the harder inasmuch as some writers in the present thread
(present company excepted) make heavy use of sarcasm.
	Would it be fair to infer that you are citing Samuelson
sympathetically?  Color me simple-minded, but when swords are drawn and
points are made with sarcasm, I sometimes find it hard to follow the
nuances.

Mason

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 1:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] "von" Hayek's "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in
Economic Sciences

Mason,
     Please reread my post carefully.  What you attribute to me was a quote
from a paper mostly about "Friedrich von Hayek" by Paul Samuelson that was
published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in its
January 2009 issue, of which I was the editor at the time.  I noted that the
quote appeared near the end of a long final footnote.
      I do believe that you are aware that Samuelson was much more favorably
disposed to the economic views of Keynes than he was to those of Hayek (many
of which he criticized in the paper, but I have not repeated any of that).
Therefore the "I" in this quotation is Samuelson, someone sympathetic to
Keynes's economic views and not at all out to knock down those views based
on his personal prejudices, not me.
      I commented that I thought repeating Samuelson's judgment of this
paper by Reder was important in that a) Samuelson essentially agrees with
Reder, and b) Samuelson was at the time the last living person who had not
only known all three of them personally: Hayek, Schumpeter, and Keynes
(Coase probably knew all of them also), but had himself been the victim of
anti-Semitism at Harvard when they failed to hire him, although it has long
been reported that Schumpeter claimed it was because the faculty was jealous
of him.  I did not spell this last point out in my previous post on this
matter.

________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of
mason gaffney [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 10:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] "von" Hayek's "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in
Economic Sciences

Rosser writes: " Reder (2000) has provided a useful exploration of such
unpleasantries.  Central to his expositions were appraisals of the triad
John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, on the
subject of anti-semitism.
Unexpectedly, I was forced to in the end to conclude that Keynes's lifetime
profile was the worst of the three. In the record of his letters to wife and
other Bloomsburg buddies, Keynes apparently remained in viewpoint much the
same as in his Eton essay on the subject as a callow seventeen-year-old."

        I claim no insight into Keynes, except that there are other kinds of
religious bigotry than anti-Semitism.  Keynes "Economic Consequences of the
Peace", however prescient it may have been otherwise, attacked Woodrow
Wilson repeatedly for his Presbyterianism.
        Others who have researched the following point (I have not) may want
to comment on frequent allegations by anti-Keynesians that leading Nazis
thought highly of The General Theory, and accepted Keynes into their
circles.

Mason Gaffney

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Robert Leeson
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] "von" Hayek's "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in
Economic Sciences

A legitimate noble title requires a legitimate royal source. Coats of arms
and titles ("von," "Archduke", "Count" etc) were abolished on 3 April 1919
by the Adelsaufhebungsgesetz, the Law on the Abolition of Nobility, by a
"republic of peasants and workers" (von Hayek 1978). Violators face fines or
six months jail.

Hayek (1994, 37) referred to "the minor title of nobility (the 'von') which
the family still bears". The Times (17 December 1931) reported that "von
Hayek" had been appointed to the Tooke Professorship; The Times (19 October
1932) published a letter from "von" Hayek on 'Spending and Saving Public
Works from Rates'; in a letter to The Times, Hayek (14 November 1981)
professed deep indignation that "von" had been attached to his name: perhaps
even Labour MPs could be "shamed" into not answering arguments by reference
to "descent."

Hayek repeatedly attached the illegal "von" to his publications: including,
symbolically, his 1935 Economica essay on 'The Maintenance of Capital'.

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Barkley Rosser - rosserjb" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, 22 May, 2014 4:24:15 AM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] The "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences

I really should stay out of this distasteful set of threads,but as the
then-editor who published Paul Samuelson's "A few remembrances of Friedrich
von Hayek (1899-1992)" in JEBO in 2009, I think I should add a few remarks
largely drawn on that paper, which I had correspondence with the late
Samuelson regarding prior to its publication.  Four points.

1) The first is not tied to that article and is simply to state that I
support the editors of this list in their efforts to provide an open forum
for free discussion, despite ensuing difficulties.

2)  On the matter of Hayek's Nobel, Samuelson supported it, although for his
role in introducing "information economics," not for his role in business
cycle theory regarding which Samuelson was fairly critical (and much of the
paper comes down pretty hard on Hayek on various matters, with many
Austrians not pleased with this paper by Samuelson).  Anyway, the paper
opens with the following:

"Hayek was the seventh to receive the Bank of Sweden's new Nobel Prize in
economics.  In my judgment his was a worthy choice.  And yet in the 1974
senior commons rooms of Harvard and MIT, the majority of the inhabitants
there seemed not to even know the name of this new laureate."

And later in the paper:

"In the 1940s Friedrich Hayek in an invited Harvard lecture introduced a new
dynamic element into the debate [the socialist calculation debate].  Call it
"information economics."  The broad competitive markets, Hayek proclaimed,
were the recipients of heterogeneous idiosyncratic bits of individual'
information.  Playing for matches rather than for real money or blood was as
different an economic dynamics as night is from day.
I was not at all the only one to be converted to the view that, as between
Abba Lerner, Oskar Lange and Ludwig von mises, Friedrich Hayek was actually
the debate's winner."...
"Hayek's 1974 Stockholm Nobel Prize was importantly won for him by his
notions about decentralized information economics discussed that day in
Cambridge, Massachusetts."

3)  Given that the unpleasant matter of anti-Semitism and the famous article
by Reder (2000) has been raised, I shall also provide Samuelson's comment on
this, which occurred near the end of a long final footnote to the paper, and
which I think is particularly relevant given that he was arguably at the
time the last living person directly affected by the issue at hand.

"Most of my gifted mentors, born in the nineteenth century, lacked today's
"political (and ethnic) correctness."  There were of course some honorable
exceptions among both my Yankee and European teachers.  Reder (2000) has
provided a useful exploration of such unpleasantries.  Central to his
expositions were appraisals of the triad John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A.
Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, on the subject of anti-semitism.
Unexpectedly, I was forced to in the end to conclude that Keynes's lifetime
profile was the worst of the three. In the record of his letters to wife and
other Bloomsburg buddies, Keynes apparently remained in viewpoint much the
same as in his Eton essay on the subject as a callow seventeen-year-old.
Hayek, I came to realize, seemed to the one of the three who at leat tried
to grow beyond his early conditioning.  The full record suggests that he did
not succeed fully in cleansing those Augean Stables.  Still, a B grade for
effort does trump a C- grade."

4)  And finally a trivial note on his using "von Hayek" in the title of the
paper while referring to "Friedrich Hayek" regularly in the text.  I urged
him to do the latter, but he would not bend on the former, arguing that this
was the name used by the Nobel Prize committee when it awarded him the
prize, and if Hayek did not object to them doing so, then he would use it in
that location.

My own view on this is that people should be called what they choose to be
called.  While Hayek used the "von" on publications in German in the 20s,
after then he used "F.A. Hayek" for his later work, particularly in English,
although I am aware that for some time afterwards he still used the "von" in
private social correspondence.  OTOH, his mentor always used "Ludwig von
Mises" on all his publications, which makes me somewhat amused by how so
many Austrians seem to violate his wishes by referring to him as just
"Mises," although Samuelson did so at one point in this paper as well.  As
far as I am concerned, they should be "Hayek" and "von Mises" respectively,
but this really is a trivial matter more of interest to overly anal journal
editors.

________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of
Robert Leeson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 7:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] The "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences

"von Hayek's contributions in the field of economic theory are both profound
and original ... He tried to penetrate more deeply into the business cycle
mechanism than was usual at that time. Perhaps, partly due to this more
profound analysis, he was one of the few economists who gave warning of the
possibility of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in the
autumn of 1929."

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/pres
s.html

Could Alan provide the evidence?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan G Isaac" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, 20 May, 2014 8:53:44 PM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] The Hayek question

On 5/20/2014 7:07 AM, Robert Leeson quoted:
> Austrians have framed Friedman ("fascist"), Pigou
> ("communist spy"), Phillips ("underground communist") and
> Keynes (a "Godhating, principle-hating, State-loving
> homosexual pervert"; Keynesians have "pushed the world
> into evil, and therefore toward God's righteous
> judgment").


Are you proposing Gary North as a representative "Austrian"?
I don't think his association with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, however regrettable it might be, earns him that
honor.

I largely agree with Eloy: the posted project outline struck
my ears as a near-comical call for the promotion of ad
hominem and guilt by association, not like a proposal for
historical investigation.  Of course that may not be the
project's intent; it may just reflect a desire to present it in
a provocative and combative way.

I would like to stress that I am not suggesting that a project
that asks why cranks are attracted to certain kinds of ideas
need be without merit, as long as there is no presumption that
the attraction of cranks to an idea implies that it is
a crank idea.  I also think that it can be reasonable to
document the moral failings of a writer, especially one who
seems to attract hagiography.  So I would not suggest that
Hayek's involvement with Pinochet or von Mises brief praise
of fascism are not fair topics for discussion, as long as
the discussion acknowledges that lapses in moral judgment do
not immediately translate into general theoretical error.

Although I was mostly amused, I did find offensive the
apparent suggestion that historians of economics might be
qualified to diagnose mental disease, and the apparent
implication that such diagnoses could shed light on the
quality of theory produced by a mind.  It may be worth
recalling that a very well-deserved "Nobel Prize in
Economics" was awarded to a man whose struggles with serious
mental illness are a matter of record.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac=