1a. Quotes on Friedrich Hayek
Quotes on Friedrich Hayek's Economics
Herbert Simon* (Economics & Psychology, Stanford)
"No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek". (Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd Edition, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981, p. 41)
*Nobel Prize winner in Economics.
Lawrence Summers* (U.S. Treasury)
"What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." (Lawrence Summers, quoted in The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace that Is Remaking the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1998, pp. 150-151.)
*Lawrence Summers is former Sec. of Treasury & former Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Vernon Smith* (Economics, U. of Arizona)
"Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century." (Vernon Smith, "Reflections on Human Action after 50 years", Cato Journal. Vol. 9, No. 2. Fall, 1999).
*Winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
Fritz Machlup* (Economics, Princeton)
"One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the 'division of knowledge' in economic society . . [But if] I had to single out the area in which Hayek's contributions were the most fundamental and pathbreaking, I would cast my vote for the theory of capital. As I said before, when I reviewed Hayek's book on The Pure Theory of Capital, it is 'my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published.' If two achievements may be named, I would add Hayek's contributions to the the theory of economic planning. Most of what has been written on systems analysis, computerized data processing, simulation of market processes, and other techniques of decision-making without the aid of competitive markets, appears shallow and superficial in the light of Hayek's analysis of the 'division of knowledge', its dispersion among masses of people. Information in the minds of millions of people is not available to any central body or any group of decision-makers who have to determine prices, employment, production, and investment but do not have the signals provided by a competitive market mechanism. Most plans for economic reform in the socialist countries seem to be coming closer to the realization that increasing decentralization of decision-making is needed to solve the problems of rational economic planning." (Fritz Machlup, "Hayek's Contribution to Economics", Swedish Journal of Economics, Vol. 76, Dec. 1974.)
*Past President, American Economics Association.
Tom Peters*
"F. A. Hayek [is] arguably the most influential economist of this century."
*Leading American consultant on business management and strategy.
Quotes on Hayek's The Sensory Order
Joaquin Fuster* (UCLA School of Medicine)
"Probably nobody has described the processes of cognitive categorization better than Hayek (1952)." (Joaquin Fuster, Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition, New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002, p. 60.)"The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but .. a Viennes economist: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A man of exceptionally broad knowledge and profound insight into the operation of complex systems, Hayek applied such insight with remarkable success to economics (Nobel Prize, 1974), sociology, political science, jurisprudence, evolutionary theory, psychology, and brain science (Hayek, 1952)." (Joaquin Fuster, Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, p. 87)
*Fuster is a leading authority on the prefrontal cortext and the neuronal basis of memory.
Gerald Edelman* (Neurobiology, Scripps)
"I must say that I have been deeply gratified by reading a book [Hayek's The Sensory Order] of which I had not been aware when I wrote my little essay on group selection theory . . I was deeply impressed . . I recommend this book to your attention [i.e. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences], as an exercise in profound thinking by a man who simply considers knowledge for its own sake. What impressed me most is his understanding that the key to the problem of perception is to comprehend the nature of classification. Taxonomists have struggled with this problem many times, but I think von Hayek considered this problem in a broader sense." (Gerald Edelman, "Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function", Bulletin -- The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Oct. 1982, p. 24)
"[Hayek] made a quite fruitful suggestion, made contemporaneously by the psychologist Donald Hebb, that whatever kind of encounter the sensory system has with the world, a corresponding event between a particular cell in the brain and some other cell carrying the information from the outside word must result in reinforcement of the connection between those cells. These day, this is known as a Hebbian synapse, but von Hayek quite independently came upon the idea. I think the essence of his analysis still remains with us . . ". (Gerald Edelman, "Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function", Bulletin -- The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Oct. 1982, p. 25)
"My eventual aim [in Neural Darwinism] is to show the bearing of this [structural] diversity [of individual nervous systems] upon the problem of generalization and upon phenomena that point up the difference between the sensory and the physical orders (Hayek 1952)." (Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism, 1987, p. 33).
". . consider the two lines in the Wudt-Hering illusion . . This rather banal
exercise serves to demonstrate that there is only a rough correspondence between what has
been called the sensory order (Hayek 1952) and the physical order. Furthermore it
bears upon point . . that the perceptual world is a world of adaptation rather than a
world of complete veridicality." (Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism, 1987, p.
28).
*Nobel Prize winner and Chairman of the Dept. of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute.
Edwin Boring* (Psychology, Harvard)
"Half the time I read [Hayek's The Sensory Order] with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension . . he is right . . most of the time." (Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly, March, 1953, p. 183)
" . . I feel sure that no one has done this particular kind of job [i.e. a physicalistic system of psychology, mind, and consciousness] nearly so well." (Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly, March, 1953, p. 183)
"I do not for a moment believe it is the last word on this matter [i.e. a physicalistic system of psychology, mind and consciousness], but it is . the best word I have ever heard spoken from this platform." (Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly, March, 1953, p. 183)
*Boring is internationally known for his famous survey of psychology.
Quotes on Hayek's Brain Theory & the Hayek / Hebb Synaptic Model.
"[Hayek] made a quite fruitful suggestion, made contemporaneously by the psychologist Donald Hebb, that whatever kind of encounter the sensory system has with the world, a corresponding event between a particular cell in the brain and some other cell carrying the information from the outside word must result in reinforcement of the connection between those cells. These day, this is known as a Hebbian synapse, but von Hayek quite independently came upon the idea. I think the essence of his analysis still remains with us . . ". (Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism, 1987, p. 25).
"Most theoretical work since the proposals of Hebb (1949) and Hayek (1952) has relied upon particular forms of dependent synaptic rules in which either pre- or postsynaptic change is contingent upon closely occurring events in both neurons taking part in the synapse." (Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism, 198