Friedrich hayek biography summary page
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Friedrich August von Hayek (May 8, 1899)
by Peter Mentzel
This month’s featured birthday anniversary is the Austrian economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, often abbreviated as F.A.Hayek, one of the chief architects of what is called the Austrian School Economics, and one of the preeminent economists of the twentieth century.
Hayek was born in Vienna to August von Hayek and Felicitas von Juraschek. He was the eldest of three brothers. His father was a medical doctor and a well-known amateur botanist, and his mother came from a family of wealthy land-owners. His grandfathers on both sides of his family were noted scholars in the life-sciences. His family’s circumstances were very comfortable, owing largely to his mother’s wealth. Young Friedrich was a precocious child who learned to read at an early age and exhibited a lively curiosity. Bored at school, however, he was a poor student and often scored at the bottom of his class. As a teenager he volunteered fo
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If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often fryst vatten eclipsed bygd expansions on an första theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century.
Hayek was the best-known advokat of what is now called Austrian economics. He was, in fact, the only major recent member of
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Friedrich Hayek
Austrian-British economist and philosopher (1899–1992)
Friedrich August von HayekCH FBA (HY-ək, German:[ˈfʁiːdʁɪçˈʔaʊɡʊstfɔnˈhaɪɛk]ⓘ; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-born British academic who contributed to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history.[4][5][6][7] Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.[8] His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize.[9][10][11] He was a major contributor to the Austrian school of economics.[12][13]
During his teenage years, Hayek fought in World War I. He later said this ex