Summary: Der Strom der Güter und Leistungen

This file is a German lecture text, with a retrospective preface and the main 1981 LSE address. Hayek uses the anniversary of his Prices and Production lectures to restate their basic problem in mature form: how extended production is coordinated when no mind can know its whole pattern. The lecture’s governing claim is that civilization’s material order rests on competitive prices as signals, not on aggregate economic commands.

Hierfür ist die Behauptung von entscheidender Bedeutung, daß die Koordination der wirtschaftlichen Tätigkeiten, der wir unsere Fähigkeit zur Erhaltung der gegenwärtigen Weltbevölkerung verdanken, unserem Vertrauen auf die Führung durch Preise zuzuschreiben ist, die auf wettbewerblichen Märkten bestimmt werden und die die unentbehrlichen Signale erzeugen, die uns sagen, was wir zu tun haben.

English translation: Of decisive importance here is the claim that the coordination of economic activities to which we owe our capacity to sustain the present world population is attributable to our reliance on the guidance of prices determined in competitive markets, which generate the indispensable signals that tell us what we have to do.

The argument moves from intellectual reminiscence into theory. Hayek distinguishes horizontal allocation across kinds of goods from longitudinal or vertical allocation across time. Because production takes time, every present act contributes to many future consumptions at varying distances; capital is therefore not a homogeneous fund but a changing temporal order. His “stream” image is meant to recover the complexity hidden by static equilibrium and macro aggregates.

Die Produktionsstruktur muß daher als ein multidimensionaler Sachverhalt angesehen werden, bei dem in jedem Augenblick die Menschen für eine Ausbringung arbeiten, die innerhalb eines weiten Bandes zukünftiger Zeitpunkte fertiggestellt sein wird, und bei dem entsprechend die Ausbringung eines jeden Zeitpunktes durch den Einsatz von Ressourcen zu ganz unterschiedlich zurückliegenden Zeitpunkten bewirkt worden ist.

English translation: The structure of production must therefore be regarded as a multidimensional phenomenon in which, at any given moment, people are working toward output that will be completed within a wide range of future points in time, and in which, correspondingly, the output at any given moment has been brought about by the input of resources at quite different points in the past.

Hayek’s central polemical target is the Keynesian model in which final demand pulls employment through the economy as if through a pipe. For him, between labor input and consumer output lies a variable capital structure: stocks, tools, intermediate goods, and plans continually rearranged by changing relative prices. Employment cannot be inferred from final expenditure alone.

Zwischen den beiden Enden liegt ein elastisches oder veränderliches Reservoir, dessen Größe von einer Reihe von Umständen abhängt, die in der Keynesschen Analyse weitgehend vernachlässigt werden.

English translation: Between the two ends there lies an elastic or variable reservoir whose size depends on a number of circumstances that are largely neglected in the Keynesian analysis.

The conceptual move is not to deny coordination but to shift it from equilibrium to adaptive disequilibrium. The market’s virtue is not omniscience; it is speed. Temporary price differences, profit opportunities, and losses redirect local decisions before any central authority could compute the whole.

Genaugenommen kann eigentlich ein Strom niemals im Gleichgewicht sein, denn gerade das Ungleichgewicht hält ihn in Fluß und bestimmt seine Richtung.

English translation: Strictly speaking, a stream can never really be in equilibrium, for it is precisely the disequilibrium that keeps it flowing and determines its direction.

This explains his defense of capitalism as a process. Since only dispersed agents know local conditions, the use of capital must be adjusted through impersonal market signals. Attempts to stabilize particular prices, wages, or incomes may satisfy the demand for security, but they block the changes by which the whole order remains viable.

Arbeitslosigkeit ist nicht so sehr eine Funktion der »aggregierten Nachfrage« als viel mehr der Elastizität der Preisstruktur, die natürlich durch alle Bemühungen um eine »gerechte« Verteilung beseitigt wird.

English translation: Unemployment is not so much a function of "aggregate demand" as much more of the elasticity of the price structure, which is of course eliminated by all efforts at a "just" distribution.

The lecture then extends the argument to capital scarcity, credit, and the Ricardo effect. Artificially cheap credit can imitate an enlarged supply of investible funds and sustain too many roundabout processes for a time, but unchanged consumer demand eventually exposes malinvestment. Monetary disturbances matter because they distort the real structure of production through relative prices.

Nicht die Größe der Gesamtnachfrage hält den Strom in Fluß, sondern jene sich rasch anpassende Umstellung der Flüßchen, aus denen er sich bildet, die durch das Spiel der Preise bewirkt wird – jene unwillkommenen Signale, die den Menschen sagen, daß sie etwas anderes tun müssen, als sie beabsichtigen.

English translation: It is not the size of aggregate demand that keeps the stream flowing, but rather that rapidly adjusting redirection of the smaller streams of which it is composed, brought about by the play of prices—those unwelcome signals that tell people they must do something other than what they intend.

Its relevance lies in Hayek’s late restatement of Austrian capital theory as a critique of macroeconomics. He presents Keynesianism as a one-dimensional picture that defines away scarcity by assuming unused resources of all kinds. The closing demand is methodological as much as political: abandon aggregate demand management as the basic frame.

Zu diesem Zweck müssen wir nicht nur seine speziellen Theorien zu den Akten legen, sondern den gesamten Ansatz, den er zur Mode gemacht hat: die Makroökonomik.

English translation: For this purpose we must lay to rest not only his particular theories but the whole approach he made fashionable: macroeconomics.