Alte Wahrheiten und neue Irrtümer

Alte Wahrheiten und neue Irrtümer is a single 1963 conference lecture. Speaking to an international savings-bank congress, Hayek treats saving as an economic, moral, and political institution. The lecture moves from the old underconsumption controversy through Keynesianism, credit policy, forced saving, growth planning, entrepreneurial capital allocation, and finally the “Wirtschaftsgesinnung” required by a free society. Its governing claim is that prosperity rests on voluntary, widely distributed capital formation, while modern doctrines that disparage thrift or entrust investment to the state weaken both markets and the habits that sustain them.

Hayek opens with the familiar illusion that spending visibly helps others whereas saving appears private and sterile. Against this surface view he restates the “old truth” of capital theory:

Der Ausgangspunkt muß natürlich sein, daß eine Bildung von Realkapital stets voraussetzt, daß wir mehr produzieren, als wir konsumieren.

English translation: The starting point must of course be that the formation of real capital always presupposes that we produce more than we consume.

He does not reduce the matter to a slogan. Saving is necessary but not sufficient: hoarding, idle bank balances, and variable liquidity reserves can interrupt the automatic link between saving and investment. This is the valid lesson of the debate revived by Keynes, but for Hayek it creates a monetary-policy task, not an indictment of thrift.

Es ist die große und schwierige Aufgabe der Kreditpolitik geworden, den Strom der für Investitionen verwendeten Mittel den durch Sparen festgesetzten Mitteln gleichzumachen.

English translation: It has become the great and difficult task of credit policy to make the flow of funds used for investment equal to the funds set aside through saving.

The lecture then distinguishes voluntary saving from coerced abstinence. Taxation, inflation, and planned shortages can force consumers to consume less and hand resources to the state or favored investors; Hayek, recalling Bentham, prefers to call this “erzwungene Frugalität.” Such devices may raise measured investment, but they do not cultivate responsibility, foresight, or dispersed ownership. Hence his critique of growth theory and development policy: national income is not a mechanical function of the quantity of “investment” injected into an economy. Costs are not values, and Keynesian investment categories may include wholly unproductive outlays.

Was interessant ist, ist nicht, wieviel auf Kapitalbildung aufgewendet wurde, sondern wieviel daraus geworden ist.

English translation: What is interesting is not how much was spent on capital formation, but what has come of it.

This conceptual shift leads to Hayek’s central liberal move: the decisive issue is not the volume of capital but the discovery of its best uses. Investment decisions are not a detachable technical sector that planners may manage while leaving markets otherwise free.

Wenn es überhaupt überzeugende Argumente zugunsten einer Wettbewerbswirtschaft gibt, die es wünschenswert machen, daß die Entscheidungen den einzelnen Unternehmen überlassen werden, dann gelten sie vor allem auch für die Investitionsentscheidungen.

English translation: If there are any convincing arguments in favour of a competitive economy that make it desirable to leave decisions to individual enterprises, then those arguments apply above all to investment decisions as well.

Competition matters because knowledge of opportunities, risks, skills, and local conditions is dispersed. Decentralized capital ownership lets many people test judgments that no central office can aggregate in advance. Thus Hayek links capital theory to entrepreneurship: the owner of even small reserves gains mobility, can finance training or relocation, and learns to bear risk. A successful entrepreneurial class presupposes a much wider class of people accustomed to handling capital.

Ein Volk wird nur dann eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerschicht hervorbringen, wenn eine vielfach größere Zahl von Menschen Gelegenheit hat, sich in der nutzbringenden Anwendung von Kapital zu versuchen.

English translation: A people will bring forth a successful class of entrepreneurs only if a many times greater number of people have the opportunity to try their hand at the profitable use of capital.

The final section turns sociological. Industrial capitalism has made it possible for masses to live without owning productive capital; that achievement also produces a salaried majority with little experience of capital maintenance, risk, and profit. Hayek contrasts the psychology of the employee with that of the independent owner:

Er denkt in Einkommen, nicht in Kapital, in angemessener Entlohnung für eine laufende Leistung, nicht in möglichen Gewinnen für riskante Einsätze, er sucht vor allem Sicherheit, während der Selbständige vor allem Gefahrenträger ist.

English translation: He thinks in terms of income, not of capital, in terms of adequate remuneration for a current performance, not in terms of possible profits for risky ventures; he seeks above all security, whereas the self-employed person is above all a bearer of risk.

This is why expansive social security worries him. A common minimum against severe need is legitimate, but guaranteeing established living standards removes the need to save and the occasion to learn capital judgment. The relevance of the lecture lies in this fusion of monetary theory, knowledge theory, and political sociology: anti-saving doctrine, inflationary finance, state investment planning, and overextended security policy all tend to replace voluntary capital formation with administered allocation. Hayek ends by making thrift a condition not merely of accumulation but of liberal understanding itself:

Nur so lernt ein ganzes Volk in Kapital und nicht in Einkommen zu denken, und das ist die Voraussetzung einer funktionierenden freien Wirtschaft.

English translation: Only in this way does a whole people learn to think in terms of capital and not of income, and this is the precondition of a functioning free economy.