Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is January 4th, 2011, and my guest is Bruce

Caldwell of Duke University. He's the author of among other books, Hayek's Challenge, and

he's the general editor of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. Bruce, welcome to Econ Talk.

Great to be here. Our subject today is F.A. Hayek. On economists who comes up

fairly often on this program, and he's having a very good run. Here we are in 2011, and

this past year saw a rap video that John Popola and I created on Hayek's ideas that has

over 2 million hits on YouTube. A love song to F.A. Hayek. I hadn't expected that by Dorian

Electra. The last time I looked was in the tens of thousands of views. I don't know where

it is lately, but it's been had a charming run of success. The road to surfed him hit number

one on Amazon, thanks to an endorsement and discussion by Glenn Beck. He's very relevant,

and we're going to talk today about why. Our plan is to talk about his life, his ideas,

and his work, particularly what someone might read who's just getting started. Let's begin

with his life. Give us a brief sketch. Tell us about his life.

Okay. Hayek is contemporaneous, basically, with the 20th century. He was born in 1899 and

died in 1992. Indeed, this was one of the reasons that I was interested in him as a figure

to study, because he was there over a period of time when economics really changed in

many ways. He participated in and also opposed some of those changes through the course of

his life. He's a good figure to study economics in the 20th century as well as himself.

...