The archive.

A useful biography can still fail its subject as an economist. In this brief review of D. B. Copland’s two lectures on W. E. Hearn, Hayek welcomes new information about Hearn’s Australian career but finds his economic thought poorly served. Hayek values Hearn’s original observations and lucid expression; he wants them examined in relation to the teaching at Trinity College and their influence on later writers. His objection is pointed: Copland makes Hearn a vehicle for contemporary Australian economists’ views. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s judgement of Hearn—and of the distinction he draws between recovering a thinker’s contribution and recruiting him for present purposes.

"Overcapacity" is less an industrial fact, this 1936 lecture contends, than a political dogma — the belief that competition either adopts new techniques too slowly or squanders capital by scrapping serviceable machines. Hayek dissolves the charge by separating technical from economic capacity: a machine may still run yet be worth nothing, because new capital does not duplicate the old but economizes on labor and materials, freeing them for use elsewhere. Old plant should survive only while the new method's total cost exceeds its bare operating cost. From this he attacks "capital preservation" as a false end, whether protecting railways against motor traffic or shielding state assets, and ridicules forced standardization for letting an authority decide what consumers ought to like. Idle plant, he adds, may signal a scarcity of capital, not a surplus.

Die Normierungsfanatiker begeben sich da auf ein außerordentlich gefährliches Feld, und ich wenigstens kann mich nicht für die Idee begeistern, daß jemand anderer für mich entscheiden soll, was mir gefallen oder schmecken soll und was nicht.

English translation: “The fanatics of standardization are venturing here onto extraordinarily dangerous ground, and I, at least, cannot warm to the idea that someone else should decide for me what I ought to like or find tasty and what not.”

Frank Knight had reduced capital to a self-perpetuating fund — permanent, self-maintaining, its replacement a mere matter of technology. Against that "mythology" Hayek defends the Austrian insight that capital is no substance behind things but a structure of heterogeneous, perishable goods whose replacement must be economically explained. He concedes that Böhm-Bawerk's single "average period of production" oversimplifies, yet insists Knight's alternative is worse, since it cannot explain how limited capital restricts the choice among known methods. More capitalistic production means investing some factor for longer; a given stock of capital goods offers not one subsistence fund but many possible time-shaped income streams. What matters are prospective returns, not original factors — and the doctrine collapses only under the fiction of perfect foresight.

The theory looks forward, not back.

Can interest remain positive when tastes are constant and capital accumulation has stopped? In this 1936 article, Hayek challenges a premise shared by otherwise opposed theories: that stable tastes imply equal valuations of present and future goods. His alternative treats stability as consistency of choice, not indifference to time. Using indifference maps of an isolated saver, he distinguishes what governs the pace of saving from what determines the return on investment. The resulting argument gives productivity a leading role while accumulation continues, without denying the importance of preferences in determining where it ends. Readers can discover why, for Hayek, explaining the cessation of saving is not the same task as explaining interest throughout the process of accumulation.

What makes a collection of tributes evidence of a teacher’s influence? In this brief 1937 review of the volume honouring F. W. Taussig, Hayek points to its restriction to former students and colleagues—and to the editors’ success in keeping forty-eight contributions concise without sacrificing substance. His praise concerns a scholarly community’s collective achievement rather than particular theoretical positions, which he explicitly declines to adjudicate. Readers encounter Hayek as an appreciative reviewer attentive to editorial discipline and intellectual breadth: he notes that “Wages and Capital” encompasses distribution and monopoly theory, while Taussig’s bibliography records interests wider than younger colleagues may know. The review offers a compact account of how teaching, personal association, and economical exposition can sustain a scholarly legacy.

Writing about economic problems before Adam Smith does not, Hayek argues, necessarily make someone his intellectual predecessor. In this brief 1937 review of E. A. J. Johnson’s Predecessors of Adam Smith, he distinguishes influence on public policy debate from contributions to economic theory. Johnson’s attention to mercantilist schemes for increasing productivity prompts Hayek to question the inclusion of writers he regards as planners or propagandists rather than significant economists. Yet he praises the scholarship, especially the research on Postlethwayt’s voluminous publications. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards for writing intellectual history: valuable documentation of what once persuaded the public need not establish how a systematic science developed.

Strip away its empirical content, and equilibrium theory is merely a "Pure Logic of Choice" — true by definition, silent about the world. In this 1937 presidential address Hayek asks what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate minds before such analysis can say anything causal. Equilibrium, he argues, means the compatibility of individual plans through time, and "correct foresight" is not a premise added from outside but the very thing equilibrium describes. The familiar appeal to a perfect market merely disguises omniscience as market form. What economics neglects is the division of knowledge — as fundamental as the division of labor — and the learning by which dispersed, situated fragments come into alignment. The essay marks Hayek's turn toward his mature account of markets as coordinators of knowledge no single mind could hold.

The situation seems here to be that before we can explain why people commit mistakes, we must first explain why they should ever be right.

The more capital goods an economy produces, the lower the return on further investment must fall — so runs the static inference this sharp intervention in trade-cycle theory sets out to break. The confusion, Hayek locates in the ambiguity of "capital": aggregate value versus the concrete form and arrangement of capital goods. Investment comes in complementary chains, and once specific fixed capital is sunk, its owners accept prices barely above operating cost, transferring the expected interest to later stages — so that completing a project begun under a 4 percent expectation stays worthwhile even at rates that would have blocked it. A hydroelectric plant may turn unprofitable yet still generate demand for motors. Past investment can thus raise, not lower, the demand for funds, with credit expansion the chief practical trigger.

The success of current investment will depend upon this expectation being fulfilled.

It was not the gold standard's international character that doomed interwar monetary order, Hayek argues, but a world unwilling to run a genuinely international money. Delivered as five lectures at Geneva in 1937, his case defines monetary nationalism as the doctrine that a nation's share of the world's money should be governed differently from the money of its own regions, and traces the resulting instability to national reserve systems perched atop small gold holdings. Variable exchange rates, he contends, magnify rather than tame short-term capital movements, breeding capital flight, trade restriction, and fresh political friction. Under a truly homogeneous international money, national denominations would matter no more than differing units of measurement, and until some international authority exists to supply it, even a mechanical gold rule is preferable to independently managed national currencies.

The Monetary Nationalists condemn it because it is international; I, on the other hand, ascribe its shortcomings to the fact that it is not international enough.

Can removing mathematical notation make price theory harder to understand? In this short review of E. H. Phelps Brown’s The Framework of the Pricing System, Hayek praises the book’s coherent exposition while questioning its approach to beginners. His objection is not to mathematical economics but to presenting functional dependencies without the tools that make them intelligible. Calculus might better prepare some students; diagrams could clarify substitution and prevent confusion with older utility concepts. The review offers a focused encounter with Hayek as a reader and teacher of economic theory, distinguishing agreement with an argument from confidence in how it is taught.

New documents can unsettle an intellectual biography without yet supplying a better one. In this 1938 review of William Robert Scott’s Adam Smith as Student and Professor, Hayek welcomes evidence that clarifies Smith’s economic thinking before his journey to France and challenges received assumptions about physiocratic influence. Yet archival abundance is not enough: poor cross-references, hard-to-read facsimiles and missing bibliographical guidance leave readers to perform too much of the historian’s work. Hayek’s distinctive concern is the distance between establishing evidence and explaining what it changes. This short review shows him weighing discoveries about Smith against the scholarly presentation needed to make their implications intelligible—and asking for a rewritten biography rather than merely an enlarged documentary record.

Assurances that economic planning can coexist with freedom are not explanations of how it would do so. This distinction drives Hayek’s short 1938 review of Findlay Mackenzie’s symposium, whose informative discussions of particular policies he distinguishes from its weaker treatment of comprehensive planning. His criticism draws on tensions within the volume itself: contributors repeatedly address liberty and democracy, while the editor concedes that war could disrupt a planned society more severely than one allowing continuous private adjustment. Hayek turns that concession against the argument for extending planning in preparation for defence. The review offers a compact encounter with his critical method: acknowledging useful scholarship while testing whether advocates have answered the institutional difficulties their own discussions expose.