Hayek: A Collaborative Biography

<div>On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the ‘International Right’. Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President.&nbsp; Pivotal to the ‘turn to the Right’ was Friedrich ‘von’ Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: ‘For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.’</div><div><br></div><div>The evidence suggests that Hayek’s fraudulent assertion was uncovered at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s – but not reported. The most likely explanation is self-censorship - for reasons of ideological correctness, fund raising and residual deference to the Second Estate. Four indirect tests suggest that ‘free’ market economists have - in other instances and presumably for fund-raising motives - suppressed embarrassing ‘knowledge’: which suggests that they were perfectly capable of suppressing ‘knowledge’ about Hayek’s non-prediction of the Great Depression.</div><div><br></div><div>With respect to the Nobel Prize and thus his ability to reach a wider audience, Hayek was fortune in having two loyal ‘intermediaries’: Lionel Robbins and Fritz Machlup who were – and probably felt themselves to be – ‘socially’ inferior to ‘von’ Hayek.</div>