The New York Times Discovers Hayek

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/10/the-new-york-times-discovers-hayek

The New York Times has a comically bad news article attempting to explain to its readers who F.A. Hayek is. The piece reports that the Tea Party has "reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas" and "resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers." As an example of this it gives F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, Steven Horwitz at Coordination Problem, and Greg Ransom at Taking Hayek Seriously have already responded to the article. I'd just add a few more data points indicating that it's just inaccurate to call Hayek obscure, dusty, or dormant. Here's a link to a photo of President Reagan greeting Hayek at the White House. Here's an article about Hayek that appeared in the New Yorker in 2000. And here's a 2004 article in the New York Times-owned Boston Globe that quotes Lawrence Summers as saying Hayek's legacy is "the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today."

by Ira Stoll  |  Oct 3, 2010 at 12:22 am Related Topics:  Hayek, Politics, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list