A Response to Comments on Samuelson on Hayek

The response is from Barkley Rosser:

Samuelson on Hayek, A Comment on Comments, Econospeak: Paul A. Samuelson has published "A few personal reminiscences of Friedrich von Hayek" in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, January 2009, vol. 69, issue 1, pp. 1-4, which I happen to edit, with an accompanying paper pp. 5-16 by Andrew Farrant and Edward MacPhail, entitled "Hayek, Samuelson, and the logic of the mixed economy?" One can link to Samuelson's paper at htttp://economistsview.typepad.com where Mark Thoma has it as one of his links for 2009-01-18... In the last two days there have also been full blown postings on The Austrian Economists, Marginal Revolution, and Brad DeLong, with lots of furious commentary on the first two about it. While Samuelson praises Hayek's economics of information, saying he was the real winner of the socialist calculation debate and deserved his Nobel, PAS also criticizes his macroeconomic theory in comparison with Keynes's, argues his Road to Serfdom was wrong in forecasting that allowing for various forms of state intervention would lead to the road to serfdom, and dismisses Hayek's own criticisms of him on this matter, with Farrant and MacPhail examining the letter exchanges between them on this issue, and largely agreeing with PAS. ...

The comments on AE and MR have been mostly perfervidly livid at PAS over this article, going on about many points. However, I wish to address one in particular that has been brought up a bunch, one that was already mashed over in a posting and comments on Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen on 11/20/08. Responding to a nasty quote by PAS in Spiegel that "libertarians are emotional cripples," he linked to p. 416 of Mark Skousen's The Making of Modern Economics, who quoted the 13th edition of Samuelson and Nordhaus Economics from 1989, p. 387: "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed [a reference to Mises and Hayek](bracketed remark by Skousen) a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." Cowen and others have jumped on this as proof that Samuelson is "incompetent" and a lot worse, even though he cited CIA data for his claims, and also of course these commentators claiming the superiority of Hayek and how dare Samuelson say all those bad things about him.

Well, some of the language in Samuelson's paper (which I edited), is a bit strong, but I agree with the substance of most of it. Furthermore, while Hayek argued that centrally planned socialism would be inefficient, an argument PAS agrees with, Hayek no more forecast the moment of the Soviet collapse than did PAS or the CIA or pretty much anybody other than a French sociologist named Revel in 1976. Also, the severe economic decline in the Soviet bloc largely came after the political collapse of the bloc. It is not at all clear such a collapse would have happened without the political collapse, if the Soviet leaders in 1989 had cracked down on the independence demonstraters in Lithuania, the people fleeing across the Hungarian border into Austria, and of course supported the Honecker regime in East Germany in preventing the Berlin Wall from falling. After all, the upshot of the Chinese crushing the demonstrations in Tienanman Square was continued economic growth with a gradual transition to its current peculiar mixed economy that has grown very rapidly. And for all the carrying on many make about the Soviet economy, while it may have been inaccurate to describe it in 1989 as "thriving," and it was falling behind the US i..., the population was not starving or homeless or without clothing or education or medical care, although it was politically repressed. But it had provided the industrial expansion that allowed it to build a military capacity that defeated Hitler's military at Stalingrad and Kursk. In short, this dumping all over PAS for these statements is fairly ridiculous, whatever one thinks of Samuelson's ultimate or broader influence on economics as the godfather of its mainstream neoclassical form in the last half of the 20th century.

The comments at The Austrian Economists can be found [here]  and the ones at Marginal Revolution are [here].