Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This week's special episode features Joseph Henrick,

the chairman of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the author of

The Weirdest People in the World, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly

Prosperous. This year, Dr. Henrik's book received the Manhattan Institute's 22 Hayek Book Prize.

And in what follows, City Journal contributing editor John Tierney will introduce Henrik, who will then deliver the Hayek lecture.

We hope you enjoy.

On behalf of the Hayek jury, I can assure you that you're in for an intellectual treat tonight.

Our winner triumphed over some very stiff competition from the other finalists this year.

There were great books by Kenneth White, James Audison, Adrian Woldridge, Gerald Gaus,

and a team of French economists led by Philippe Aguon.

I salute all the finalists for exploring Hayekian ideas so well,

and also for doing it with a literary flair that frankly is not always present in Hayek's own prose. But his profound wisdom, of course, is not always present in Hayek's own prose.

But his profound wisdom, of course, is timelier than ever.

And this evening we'll hear about one of his most prescient ideas, and it was one that was so

far ahead of his time that it was pretty much ignored during his life, and it has only become a hot topic recently

among researchers around the world.

Now, Hayek was best known during his lifetime as a lonely critic of socialism and central

planning.

In the 1940s, when his fellow economists were enthusiastically nationalizing

industries and expecting the Soviet Union to soon overtake the West economically, he published

an unlikely bestseller, the title of The Road to Serfdom. And in that, he predicted that

the central planners were doomed to fail because of overconfidence

...