Friedrich A. Hayek

Friedrich A. Hayek was an economist and social theorist, born in Vienna and later naturalized as a British citizen, closely associated with the Austrian school of economics. Hayek argued that the knowledge needed to run an economy is dispersed among millions of individual actors rather than available to any central planner, and that market prices function as a signal that communicates this dispersed knowledge and coordinates decisions without anyone needing to grasp the whole picture. His 1944 book The Road to Serfdom warned that central economic planning tends toward the concentration of political power and the erosion of individual liberty, an argument that reached well beyond academic economics into wider public debate. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and remained a leading voice for market oriented, anti planning economics through the middle decades of the twentieth century.