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From:
Robert Cord <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 29 May 2014 22:04:14 +0100
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A small point, if I may: Having carried out at least a little research on
Keynes, I have not come across any evidence of personal contact between
him and Samuelson. The same applies, I think, to Keynes and Coase. I am
happy to be corrected.

Friedman had one contact with Keynes. See here for details:

https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/when-keynes-rejected-friedmans-paper/

As ever

Bob


On Thu, May 29, 2014 21:03, Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb wrote:
> 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/p
> ress.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

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