[발췌 10장: B. Caldwell's] Hayek's Challenge

출처: Bruce Caldwell, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

자료: 구글도서

차례:

Ⅰ. The Austrian School and its OpponentsㅡHistoricists, Socialists, and Positivists

• 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 

Ⅱ. Hayek's Journery

• 6. Hayek in Vienna  7. Monetary Theory and Methodology 8. Hayek at the London School of Economics 9. Some Methodological Debates of the 1930s 10. "Economics and Knowledge" and Hayek's Transformation 11. The Abuse of Reason Project 12. Individualism and the Sensory Order 13. Rules, Orders, and Evolution

Ⅲ. Hayek's Challenge

• 14. Journey' EndㅡHayek's Multiple Legacies 15. Epilogue: A Meditation on 20th-Century Economics

* * *

※ 발췌(excerpts):

Chapter 10_ "Economics and Knowledge" and Hayek's Transformation

On 10 November 1936, Hayek delivered his presidential address before the London Economics Club. The address was published the next February in Economica as "Economics and Knowledge". Many years later, Hayek would claim that the paper played an important role in the development of his thought. Thus, in 1964, he wrote:

(... ...)

One finds similar sentiments expressed in Rules and Order (Hayek, 1973, 13), and, in addition to such published reminiscences, Hayek repeatedly mentions "Economics and Knowledge" in his interview in the late 1970s. He was, if anything, more emphatic about its importance there, his words suggesting that he might even have had some glimpse of the significance of the article back when he was writing it:

It was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. If you asked me, I would say that up till that moment I was developing conventional ideas. With the 1937 lecture to the Economics Club in London, my Presidential Address, which is "Economics and Knowledge," I started my own way of thinking.

Sometimes in private I say I have made one discovery and two inventions in the social sciences: the discovery is the approach of the utilization of dispersed knowledge, which is the short formula which I use for it; and the two inventions I have made are decentralization of money and my system of democracy... (...)

(... ...) I will first review exactly what Hayek says in it, then examine the origins of some of his ideas. Next, I explore some reasons why, at least from the perspective of today, it was, indeed, a significant paper. In appendix C, I discuss some of the conflicting interpretations of this episode that exists in the secondary literature.

"Economics and Knowledge": A Summary

Hayek's goal in "Economics and Knowledge" is to examine "the role which assumptions and propositions about the knowledge possessed by the different members of society play in economic analysis"[1]  Hayek contends at the outset that the tautologies of formal equilibrium analysis are incapable of telling us anything about the real world. Formal analysis gains empirical content only when economists ca "fill those formal propositions with definite statements about how knowledge is acquired and communicated" (33). Noting that the same sorts of questions had come up in recent discussions of the role of the assumption of foresight in equilibrium analysis, Hayek concludes that the very "concept of equilibrium itself can be made definite and clear only in terms of assumptions concerning foresight" (34). Like Hutchison would two years later, Hayek holds that questions of knowledge and its acquisition, the assumptions that are made concerning foresight, and the notion of equilibrium are all related.

Hayek points out that the use of the equilibrium constructs is not problematic when, using the pure logic of choice, it is applied to an isolated individual. (...)