Adam Smith Lives!

Hayek's Road to Serfdom 60 years after

The European Journal of Political Economy has just published a special collection of linked papers on Hayek's Road to Serfdom, 60 Years After.  (Linked collections of history of economic thought papers seem to be appearing more frequently than they used to.  I've enjoyed being part of several such collections and these days I always propose paper sessions rather than papers at conferences.)

Here's the abstract of the paper by David Levy at GMU, Andrew Farrant (now at Dickinson College) and myself. 

This paper re-examines Hayek's Road to Serfdom in historical context. Of particular interest is Hayek's claim that “left” and “right” socialism of the 1930s had much in common. In making this argument, Hayek held that all socialism implied planning at the expense of consumer sovereignty. We first agree to plan, but if we are then unable to agree on its contents, someone imposes a specific course of action on us. Hayek was strenuously opposed at the time by Abba Lerner and E.F.M. Durbin, who held that we can conceptualize, and perhaps put into place, a sort of socialism which yields to the will of consumer preferences.

There are also wonderful pieces by Ali Khan and Ed McPhail.  Both have presented at the GMU Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought.  But there's more:  terrific comments by Pete Boettke, Bruce Caldwell and Dave Colander and a reply by David, myself and Andrew.  All makes for very good reading.  Our piece has some good pictures; I'll post them here before long.

We're not done.  At the 2006 ASSAs, we're having a session on Buchanan, Hayek, and the Constitutional Order.  Ali Khan, David and I, and Pete Boettke will present.  Bruce Caldwell will comment.  This promises to be a terrific session as long as David Levy and I get the paper written...!

The Coal Question, then and now

Last Saturday my family and I attended a wedding in Port Dalhousie (pronounced "daloosie"), Ontario.  Our drive there elicited comments about the price of gasoline.  Someone remarked that Canada needs a national energy policy.  All the Canadian residents agreed.  There was a hint of national feeling as well, as they looked at the US resident (me) and seemed to imply that whatever might happen in America, Canadians might chart a distinct energy path.

Energy has long held a special place in the minds of the public, as well as economists.  And energy and national pride have been linked from the beginning.  William Stanley Jevons' 1865 The Coal Question:  An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines captured the imaginations of the British public and parliamentarians alike.  J. S. Mill discussed it at some length in Parliament.  W. E. Gladstone used it to support a reduction of the National Debt. 

The book is a terrific read.

Jevons' conclusion was that British manufacturing supremacy would be shortlived because relative extraction costs would rise there, compared to the US.  Did Jevons propose a national energy policy in response?  Nope.  This is not to say Jevons didn't have policy recommendations in mind -- including the one that Gladstone propounded, of reducing the national debt.  But though he advocated widespread education to reduce the "ignorance, improvidence, and brutish drunkenness of our lower classes," Jevons repudiated a national policy designed to alter the course of energy consumption.  Britain, he argued, was faced with a "momentous choice" between the "brief but true greatness" associated with the free development of trade patterns and innovation, and the "longer continued mediocrity" that would follow a policy to restrict the rate of coal consumption.