Nobel economics laureate Friedrich Hayek is "fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on MargaretThatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him," writes Virginia Postrel in The Boston Globe:
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly "irrational" customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today's rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today's fragmented and specialized markets, today's emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today's multicultural challenges. . . . his 1944 bestseller The Road to Serfdom helped catalyze the free-market political movement in the United States and continues to sell thousands of copies a year.
"The key to a functioning economy -- or society -- is decentralized competition," summarizes Postrel. "In a market economy, prices act as a 'system of telecommunications,' coordinating information far beyond the scope of a single mind. They permit ever-evolving order to emerge from dispersed knowledge."
Beyond his lasting legacy in the field of economics, the polymath Hayek "foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later":
"Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals," says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. "Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names `connectionism' and `parallel distributed processing.' Remarkably, Hayek is never cited."
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