Dear list members, dear Bruce,

I have been following the discussion initiated by David Colander on Monday and would now like to add two comments of mine, one of more general character and one specific on Hayek.

- In my view, the question if an economist "grows more/less classical liberal" in the course of his life is not answerable in a satisfactory manner for at least three reasons. Not only is the term "classical liberal" rather vague and difficult to interpret/operationalize. Even if accept it as a proxy, economists may not monotonously move from "more" to "less" or vice versa, but might move/oscillate like waves from "more" to '"less" to "more" etc. all their life. Above all, for me the term "classical liberal" is not one-dimensional but has many different levels and layers, the most obvious ones being the various areas of economic policy. What if an author becomes "more classical liberal" regarding monetary policy but "less classical liberal" in terms of social policy? How could we weigh such contradictory developments and aggregate them to an overall assessment?

- I did not write this in order to claim that we cannot trace patterns of evolution in an author. On the contrary, in my thesis I was trying to do precisely this, i.e. to have a look at the development of Eucken, Hayek, Mises and Röpke within the decades of their oeuvre. As to Hayek and the 1976 preface of "The Road to Serfdom" quoted by Bruce, I have my own interpretation which I would like to share here. The "current interventionist superstitions" of the 1930s and 1940s Hayek claims to have liberated himself from in 1976 are, in my reading, his proximity to the "Old Chicago" School of Knight and Simons as well as to the Freiburg School of Eucken and Böhm. Notable German Hayek scholars have claimed over the years that Hayek between the late 1930s and the 1960s might be seen as an ordo-liberal, since for him the "rules of the game" of catallaxy are consciously designable and shapable in this period, unlike their later being the product of cultural evolution. In case this type of reasoning is interesting to some list members, let me immodestly link to two papers of a colleague of mine and myself where we look at precisely this "Old Chicago"-Freiburg-Hayek relationship:

- http://www.hwwi.org/uploads/tx_wilpubdb/HWWI_Research_Paper_5-11.pdf
- http://www.hwwi.org/uploads/tx_wilpubdb/HWWI_Research_Paper-109.pdf

To make the "Hayek II as an ordo-liberal" argument more compelling, I would like to add a link to a lecture of Professor Buchanan he gave at the Summer Institute of Sandy Peart and David Levy in June 2011. First, at 34:30 you can hear his view of the strong proximity between "Old Chicago" and Freiburg. At 1:13:10 I ask Professor Buchanan the question on distinguishing the ordo-liberal Hayek II from the evolutionist Hayek III and, as you can hear in the video, he very much agrees with this claim, himself dating the shift to around the time of the third volume of "Law, Legislation and Liberty".

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SXhW9ucEW8

As a conclusion, let me propose to analyze not if somebody becomes "more" or "less" classical liberal in a quantitative manner, but rather to have a look at how his/her liberalism evolves in qualitative terms.

Best regards,
Stefan Kolev

---
Prof. Dr. Stefan Kolev

Hamburgisches WeltWirtschaftsInstitut gemeinnützige GmbH (HWWI)
Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI)
Zweigniederlassung Thüringen
c/o Thüringer Aufbaubank
Gorkistraße 9
99084 Erfurt
Tel +49 (0) 179-125 75 76

Internet: www.hwwi.org
Email: [log in to unmask]

Amtsgericht Hamburg HRB 94303
Geschäftsführer: Prof. Dr. Thomas Straubhaar, Gunnar Geyer
Umsatzsteuer-ID: DE 241849425
________________________________________
Von: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] im Auftrag von Bruce Caldwell [[log in to unmask]]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 29. August 2013 13:52
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: [SHOE] policy view changes of Nobel Prize winners

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/